TEXT:  
    
    
    
    
    
    
   The Call of Cthulhu
    
   H. P. Lovecraft
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
                                                  
                                                  The Call of Cthulhu
    
              Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a
              survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when...
              consciousness was manifest, 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              long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing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 deadly
   light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
    
   Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of
   the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form
   transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survival in
   terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a
   bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the
   single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I
   think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse,
   like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an
  
   accidental piecing together of separated things - in this case
   an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I
   hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out;
   certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so
   hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to
   keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would
   have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.
    
   My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-7
   with the death of my great-uncle, George Gammell Angell,
   Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages inBrownUniversity
   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 theNewportboat; 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 inBoston. 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 always in his
   pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when I
   did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more
   closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the
   queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings
   and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter
   years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures?
   I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for
   this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.
   The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch
   thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of
   modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern
   in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of
  
   cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often
   reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric
   writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs
   seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much
   familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed
   in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint at
   its remotest affiliations.
    
   Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of
   evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution
   forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be
   a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form
   which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my
   somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous
   pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I
   shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy,
   tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with
   rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole
   which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure
   was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural
   background
    
   The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a
   stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent
   hand; and made no pretension to literary style. What seemed
  
   to be the main document was headed 'CTHULHU CULT'
   in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous
   reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was
   divided into two sections, the first of which was headed
   '1925 - Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas
   St.,Providence, R. I.,' and the second; 'Narrative of Inspector
   John R. Legrasse,121 Bienville St.,New Orleans,
   La., at 1908 A. A, S. Mtg. - Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb's
   Acct.' The other manuscript papers were all brief notes,
   some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different
   persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and
   magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliott's Atlantis and the Lost
   Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret
   societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in
   such mythological and anthropological source-books as
   Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in
   Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental
   illness and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of
   1925.
    
   The first half of the principal manuscript told a very
   peculiar tale. It appears that on1 March 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-LysBuildingnear that institution. Wilcox was a,
   precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and
   had from childhood excited attention through the strange
   stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He
   called himself 'psychically hypersensitive,' but the staid folk
   of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely
   'queer'. Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped
   gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a
   small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even theProvidence
   Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had
   found him quite hopeless.
    
   On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript,
   the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's
   archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on
   the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which
   suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle
   showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous
   freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but
   archaeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed my
   uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was
   of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his
  
   whole conversation, and which I have since found highly
   characteristic of him. He said, 'It is new, indeed, for I made it
   last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older
   than broodingTyreor the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-
   girdledBabylon.'
    
   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 earth-
   quake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in
   New Englandfor some years; and Wilcox's imaginations had
   been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an
   unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks
   and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and
   sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the
   walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below
   had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation
   which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he
   attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble
   of letters 'Cthulhu fhtagn'
    
   This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which
   excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the
   sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost
   frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found
   himself working, chilled and clad only in his nightclothes,
  
   when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle
   blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness
   in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design.
   Many of his questions seemed highly out of place to his
   visitor especially those which tried to connect the latter with
   strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand
   the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in
   exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread
   mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor
   Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed
   ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his
   visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore
   regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript
   records daily calls of the young man, during which he related
   startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was
   always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping
   stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting
   monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable
   save gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated
   are those rendered by the letters 'Cthulhu' and 'R'lyeh.'
    
   On 23 March 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 inWaterman 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 theThayer Streetoffice 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 2 April at about3 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 22 March.
   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
   scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my
   continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were
   those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering
   the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his
   strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly
   instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst
   nearly all the friends whom he could question without
   impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and
   the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The
   reception of his request seems to have been varied; but he
   must at the very least, have received more responses than
   any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary.
   This original correspondence was not preserved but his
   notes formed a thorough and really significant digest.
   Average people in society and business -New England's
   traditional 'salt of the earth' - gave an almost completely
   negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless
  
   nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always
   between 23 March and 2 April - 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
   old data which my uncle had possessed, had been
   imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from
   aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From 28 February to 2 April
   a large proportion of the dreams being immeasurable 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 towards the last. One case, which the
   note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a
   widely known architect with leanings towards theosophy
   and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young
  
   Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later after
   incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen
   of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead
   of merely by number, I should have attempted some
   corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I
   succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however,
   bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the
   objects of the professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did
   this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach
   them.
    
   The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases
   of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given period.
   Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for
   the number of extracts was tremendous, and the sources
   scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide
   inLondon, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window
   after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the
   editor of a paper inSouth America, where a fanatic deduces a
   dire future from visions he has seen. A dispatch from
   Californiadescribes a theosophist colony as donning white
   robes en masse for some 'glorious fulfilment' which never
   arrives, whilst items fromIndiaspeak guardedly of serious
   native unrest towards the end of March. Voodoo orgies
   multiply inHaiti, and African outposts report ominous
  
   mutterings. American officers in thePhilippinesfind certain
   tribes bothersome about this time, andNew Yorkpolicemen
   are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of 22-23
   March The west ofIreland, too, is full of wild rumour and
   legendry and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Boonot
   hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in theParisspring
   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 old matters which had made the sculptor's dream and
   bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of
   the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it
   appears Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of
   the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown
   hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can
   be rendered only as 'Cthulhu'; and all this in so stirring and
   horrible a connection that it is small wonder he pursued
   young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
  
    
   This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen
   years before when the American Archaeological Society
   held its annual meeting inSt 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 Orleansfor 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 wooden
  
   swamps south ofNew Orleansduring a raid on a supposed
   voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites
   connected with it, that the police could not but realize that
   they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them,
   and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the
   African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic
   and unbelieveable tales extorted from the captured
   members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the
   anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might
   help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track
   down the cult to its fountain-head.
    
   Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the
   sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing
   had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into
   a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding
   around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter
   strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so
   potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognized
   school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet
   centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its
   dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
    
   The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to
   man for close and careful study, was between seven and
   eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship.
  
   It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline,
   but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass
   of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws
   on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This
   thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural
   malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence,
   and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or
   pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips
   of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat
   occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the
   doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge
   and extended a quarter of the way down towards 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
   lifelike, and the more subtly fearful because its source was
   so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable
   age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it show with
   any known type of art belonging to civilization's youth - or
   indeed to any other time.
    
   Totally separate and apart, its very material was a
   mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its
   golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled
  
   nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters
   along the base were equally baffling; and no member
   present, despite a representation of half the world's expert
   learning in this field, could form the least notion of even
   their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and
   material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct
   from mankind as we know it; something frightfully
   suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our
   world and our conceptions have no part.
    
   And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and
   confessed defeat at the inspector's problem, there was one
   man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre
   familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who
   presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew.
   This person was the late William Channing Webb, professor
   of anthropology inPrincetonUniversity, and an explorer of
   no slight note.
    
   Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before,
   in a tour ofGreenlandandIcelandin search of some
   Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst
   high up on theWest Greenlandcoast had encountered a
   singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a
   curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate
   bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which
  
   other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only
   with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly
   ancient 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 as far as he could tell,
   it was rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial
   thing now lying before the meeting.
    
   These data, received with suspense and astonishment by
   the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector
   Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with
   questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the
   swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought
   the professor to remember as best he might the syllables
   taken down amongst the diabolist Eskimos. There then
   followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment
   of really awed silence when both detective and scientist
  
   agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two
   hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in
   substance, both the Eskimo wizards and theLouisiana
   swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something
   very like this - the word-divisions being guessed at
   from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud;
    
      'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.'
    
   Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for
   several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him
   what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This
   text, as given, ran something like this:
    
     'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.'
    
   And now, in response to a general urgent demand, Inspector
   Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience
   with the swamp 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 1 November 1907, there had come to New Orleans
  
   police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon
   country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive
   but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the
   grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen
   upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but
   voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known;
   and some of their women and children had disappeared
   since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant
   beating far within the black haunted woods where no
   dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing
   screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames;
   and, the frightened messenger added, the people could
   stand it no more.
    
   So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an
   automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the
   shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable
   road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence
   through the terrible cypress woods where day never came.
   Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss
   beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or
   fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid
   habitation a depression which every malformed tree and
   every fungous islet combined to create. At length the
   squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in
  
   sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the
   group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms
   was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling
   shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted.
   A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale
   undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night.
   Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed
   squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch
   towards 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 polypus 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'lberville, 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 towards the red glare and the muffled tom-
   toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal
   qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one
   when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and
   orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to demoniac
   heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and
   reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential
   tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less
   organized ululations would cease, and from what seemed a
   well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in singsong
   chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
    
   'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.'
    
   Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees
   were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself.
   Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into
   a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately
   deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the
  
   face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly
   hypnotized with horror.
   In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of
   perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On
   this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of
   human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola
   could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were
   braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous
   ringshaped 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 bacchanale
   between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
    
   It may have been only imagination and it may have been
   only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable
   Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the
   ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the
   wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D.
   Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to
  
  hint of the
   faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes
   and 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 mulattos,
   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 suprising 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. These Old Ones were gone
   now inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead
   bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first man,
   who formed a cult which had never died. This was that
   cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and
   always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark
   places all over the world until the time when the great
   priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of
   R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth
   again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the
   stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be
   waiting to liberate him.
    
   Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret
   which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not
   absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for
   shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these
  
   were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old
   Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might
   say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one
   could read the old writing now, but things were told by word
   of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret - that was
   never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only
   this: 'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.'
    
   Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be
   hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions.
   All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the
   killing had been done by Black-winged Ones which had
   come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the
   haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent
   account could ever be gained. What the police did extract
   came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named
   Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and
   talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of
   China.
    
   Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled
   the speculations of theosophists and made man and the
   world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been
   aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had
   had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless
   Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean
  
   stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of
   time before man came, but there were arts which could
   revive Them when the stars had come round again to the
   right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed,
   come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images
   with Them.
    
   These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not
   composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape
   for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? - but that
   shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right,
   They could plunge from world to world through the sky;
   but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But
   although They no longer lived, They would never really
   die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of
   R'lyeh preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a
   glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might
   once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force
   from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The
   spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented
   Them from making an initial move, and They could only
   lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions
   of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the
   universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted
   thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When,
  
   after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old
   Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their
   dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the
   fleshy minds of mammals.
    
   Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult
   around small idols which the Great Ones showed them;
   idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would
   never die till the stars came right again, and the secret
   priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive
   His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would
   be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as
   the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and
   evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men
   shouting and killing and 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 had
   happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths
  
   and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep
   waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not
   even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse.
   But memory never died, and high priests said that the city
   would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of
   the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and
   full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten
   sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much.
   He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or
   subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The 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 deserts
   of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden
   and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult,
   and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book
   had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen
   said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of
   the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might
   read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
    
              That is not dead which can eternal lie,
              And with strange 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
   publication of the society. Caution is the first care of those
   accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture.
   Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb,
   but at the latter's death it was returned to him and
   remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago.
   It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the
   dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
    
   That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I
   did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon
   hearing after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of
   the cult, of a sensitive young man, who had dreamed not
   only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-
   found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come
   in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the
  
   formula uttered alike by Eskimo diabolists and mongrel
   Louisianans? Professor Angell's instant start on an
   investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently
   natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of
   having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of
   having invented a series of dreams to heighten and
   continue the mystery at my uncle's expense. The dream-
   narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of
   course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my
   mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to
   adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So,
   after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and
   correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes
   with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to
   Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I
   thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and
   aged man.
    
   Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in
   Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of
   seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its
   stuccoed front amidst the lovely Colonial houses on the
   ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest
   Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his
   rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered
  
   about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He
   will, I believe, be heard from some time as one of the great
   decadents; for he has crystallized in clay and will one day
   mirror in marble those nightmares and fantasia which
   Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith
   makes visible in verse and in painting.
    
   Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned
   languidly at my knock and asked me my business without
   rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some
   interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing
   his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for
   the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard,
   but sought with some subtlety to draw him out.
    
   In a short time I became convinced of his absolute
   sincerity for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none
   could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had
   influenced his art profoundly, and he showed me a morbid
   statue whose contours almost made me shake with the
   potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having
   seen the original of this thing except in his own dream
   bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves in-
   sensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape
   he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing
   of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle's relentless
  
   catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I
   strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have
   received the weird impressions.
    
   He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion;
   making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean
   city of slimy green stone - whose geometry, he oddly said, was
   all wrong - and hear with frightened expectancy the
   ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: 'Cthulhu
   fhtagn, Cthulhu fhtagn.'
    
   These words had formed part of that dread ritual which
   told of dead Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at
   R'lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs.
   Wilcox, I was sure, had. heard of the cult in some casual
   way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his
   equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its
   sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression
   in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now
   beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a
   very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly
   affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like;
   but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and
   his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all
   the success his talent promises.
  
    
   The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and
   at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into
   its origin and connections. I visited New Orleans, talked
   with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party,
   saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the
   mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately,
   had been dead for some years. What I now heard
   so graphically at first hand, though it was really no more
   than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written,
   excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a
   very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose
   discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My
   attitude was still one of absolute materialism as I wish it still
   were, and I discounted with a most inexplicable perversity
   the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected
   by Professor Angell.
    
   One thing which I began to suspect, and which I now fear
   I know, is that my uncle's death was far from natural. He fell
   on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront
   swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a
   negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine
   pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be
   surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as
   ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and
  
   beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone;
   but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead.
   Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering
   the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears? I
   think Professor Angel1 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, Sydney Bulletin for 18 April 1925. It had escaped
   even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its
   issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's
   research.
    
   I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor
   Angell called the 'Cthulhu Cult,' and was visiting a
   learned friend of Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a
   local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one
   day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage
  
   shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught
   by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath
   the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for
   my friend has tide 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 Experi-
       ence. 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 NZ, which
   was sighted 12 April in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude
   152° 17', with one living and one dead man aboard.
    
   The Vigilant left Valparaiso 25 March, and on 2 April was
   driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally
   heavy storms and monster waves. On 12 April the derelict
   was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found
   upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious
   condition and one man who had evidently been dead for
   more than a week.
    
   The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of
   unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose
   nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society,
   and the Museum in College Street all profess complete
   bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin
   of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
    
   This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly
   strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen,
   a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate
   of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed
   for Callao 20 February, with a complement of eleven men.
  
    
   The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south
   of her course by the great storm of 1 March, and on 22
   March, in S. Latitude 49º 51', W. Longitude 128º 34',
   encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking
   crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered
   peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon
   the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning
   upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass
   cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment.
    
   The Emma's men showed fight, says the survivor, and
   though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the
   waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and
   board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht's
   deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being
   slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and
   desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
    
   Three of 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 2 April.
    
   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 1 March.
    
   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?
    
   1 March - our 28 February 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. 23 March 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 2 April - 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 seige of mankind's
   soul.
    
   That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and
   arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San
   Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin: where,
   however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-
   members who had lingered in the old sea taverns.
   Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention;
   though there was vague talk about one inland trip these
  
   mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red
   flame were noted on the distant hills.
    
   In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with
   yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive
   questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage
   in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in
   Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no
   more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they
   could do was to give me his Oslo address.
    
   After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with
   seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw
   the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, in Circular
   Quay at Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its
   noncommittal bulk. The crouching image with its
   cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and
   hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at
   Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a
   thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the
   same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly
   strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse's
   smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had
   found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world
   held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of
   what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great
  
   Ones: 'They had come from the stars, and had brought
   Their images with Them.'
    
   Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never
   before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo.
   Sailing for London, I re-embarked at once for the Norwegian
   capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in
   the shadow of the Egeberg.
    
   Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of
   King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo
   during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as
   'Christiania.' I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked
   with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient
   building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black
   answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment
   when she told me in halting English that Gustaf
   Johansen was no more.
    
   He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the
   doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no
   more than he had told the public, but had left a long
   manuscript - of 'technical matters' as he said - written in
   English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of
   casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near
  
   the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic
   window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once
   helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach
   him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the
   end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.
    
   I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will
   never leave me till I, too, am at rest; 'accidentally' or
   otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connection with
   her husband's 'technical matters' was sufficient to entitle me
   to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to
   read it on the London boat.
    
   It was a simple, rambling thing - a naïve sailor's effort at a
   postfacto 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 show why the sound of the water against the
   vessel's sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped
   my ears with cotton.
    
   Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though
   he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly
   again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind
   life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed
   blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea,
  
   known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to
   loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall
   heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
    
   Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-
   admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on 20
   February, 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 22 March, and I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote of
   her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on
   the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some
   peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their
   destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shows ingenuous
   wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against
   his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry.
   Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht
   under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone
   pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47º 9', W.
   Longitude 126º 43', come upon a coastline of mingled mud,
   ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing
   less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror-
   the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in
   measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome
  
   shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great
   Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and
   sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts
   that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called
   imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of
   liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not
   suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
    
   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 any sane planet. Awe at the
   unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the
   dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the
   stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs
   with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is
   poignantly visible in every line of the mate's frightened
   description.
    
   Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen
   achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the
   city; for instead of describing any definite structure or
  
   building, he dwells only on the broad impressions of vast
   angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great to belong to
   anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with
   horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about
   angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of
   his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the
   dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and
   loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from
   ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst
   gazing at the terrible reality.
    
   Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on
   this monstrous acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over
   titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal
   staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when
   viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from this
   sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense
   lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven
   rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first
   showed convexity.
    
   Something very like fright had come over all the explorers
   before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed
   was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn
   of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they
  
   searched - vainly, as it proved - for some portable souvenir
   to bear away.
    
   It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot
   of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest
   followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved
   door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was,
   Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that
   it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and
   jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it
   lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-
   door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place
   was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the
   ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of
   everything else seemed fantasmally variable.
    
   Briden pushed at the stone in several places without
   result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the
   edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed
   interminably along the grotesque stone moulding - that is,
   one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all
   horizontal - and the men wondered how any door in the
   universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the
   acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they
   saw that it was balanced.
    
  
   Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or
   along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone
   watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven
   portal. In this fantasy of prismatic distortion it moved
   anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of
   matter and perspective seemed upset.
    
   The aperture was black with a darkness almost material.
   That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it
   obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been
   revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its
   aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it
   slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping
   membranous wings. The odour arising from the newly
   opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-
   eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound
   down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening
   still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly
   squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black
   doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of
   madness.
    
   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 designs, a band of
   innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of
   years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for
   delight.
    
   Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before
   anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the
   universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera and Angstrom.
   Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly
   over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and
   Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of
   masonry which shouldn't have been there; an angle which
   was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden
   and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for
   the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the
   slimy stones and hesitated, floundering at the edge of the
   water.
    
  
   Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite
   the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of
   only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between
   wheels and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst
   the distorted horrors of the indescribable scene, she began to
   chum 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 at
   intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst
   Johansen was wandering deliriously.
    
   But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the
   Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully
   up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the
   engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed
   the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the
   noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher
   the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the
   pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the
   stern of a demon galleon. The awful squid-head with
   writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy
  
   yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly.
    
   There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy
   nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand
   opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put
   on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid
   and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a
   venomous seething astern; where - God in heaven! - the
   scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was
   nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its
   distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus
   from its mounting steam.
    
   That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the
   idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for
   himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to
   navigate after the first bold flight; for the reaction had taken
   something out of his soul. Then came the storm of 2 April,
   and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There
   is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity,
   of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet's tail,
   and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from
   the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating
   chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green,
   bat-winged mucking 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 shall I 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.
    
    
    
    
    
    
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/Call of Cthulhu/EXTRAS/Novel/The Call Of Cthulhu - H. P. Lovecraft.pdf