I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight
I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug
which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and
shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street
below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or
a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may
guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have
forgetfulness or death.
It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad
Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the
German sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and
the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later
degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we
of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us
as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our
captors, that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone
in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.
When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of
my surroundings. Never a competent navigator, I could only guess
vaguely by the sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator.
Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or coast-line was in
sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted
aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing
ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land. But neither
ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the
heaving vastnesses of unbroken blue.
The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for
my slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at
last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy
expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous
undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded
some distance away.
Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of
wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I
was in reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air
and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very
core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of
other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud
of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere
words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence
and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in
sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of
the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a
nauseating fear.
The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in
its cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my
feet. As I crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one
theory could explain my position. Through some unprecedented volcanic
upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the
surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had
lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths. So great was the extent
of the new land which had risen beneath me, that I could not detect the
faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I might. Nor
were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.
For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay
upon its side and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the
heavens. As the day progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness,
and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling purposes in a
short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for
myself a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland
journey in search of the vanished sea and possible rescue.
On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with
ease. The odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned
with graver things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an
unknown goal. All day I forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away
hummock which rose higher than any other elevation on the rolling
desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled
toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when
I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I attained the base of the
mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had appeared from a
distance; an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief from
the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the
hill.
I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning
and fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I
was awake in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such
visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again. And
in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day.
Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me
less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which
had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my pack, I started for the crest
of the eminence.
I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a
source of vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I
gained the summit of the mound and looked down the other side into an
immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet
soared high enough to illumine. I felt myself on the edge of the world;
peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through
my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s
hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.
As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes
of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges
and outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy foot-holds for a descent,
whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very
gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I
scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope
beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps where no light had yet
penetrated.
All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on
the opposite slope, which rose steeply about an hundred yards ahead of
me; an object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the
ascending moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon
assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct impression that its
contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A closer
scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its
enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at
the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a
doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive
bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and
thinking creatures.
Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the
scientist’s or archaeologist’s delight, I examined my surroundings more
closely. The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above
the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact
that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of
sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the
slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean
monolith; on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and
crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown
to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books; consisting for the
most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels,
octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Several characters
obviously represented marine things which are unknown to the modern
world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen
plain.
It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me
spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of
their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would
have excited the envy of a Doré. I think that these things were
supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the
creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some
marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which
appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare
not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint.
Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were
damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet,
shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other
features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have
been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background;
for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale
represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say,
their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they
were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring
tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the
first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck
at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the
most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer
reflections on the silent channel before me.
Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to
the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast,
Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of
nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly
arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain
measured sounds. I think I went mad then.
Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious
journey back to the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang
a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. I have
indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the
boat; at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones
which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.
When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital;
brought thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up
my boat in mid-ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my
words had been given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the
Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to
insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought
out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions
regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but
soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my
inquiries.
It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I
see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient
surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So
now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the
information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask
myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm—a mere freak of
fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape
from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come
before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep
sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very
moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their
ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on
submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they
may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the
remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall
sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal
pandemonium.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense
slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that
hand! The window! The window!
Return to “Dagon”
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