Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will
tell the audient void. . . .
I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The
general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social
upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous
physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger
as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I
recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and
whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat
or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt
was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill
currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a
daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat
lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the
universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of
gods or forces which were unknown.
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none
could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a
Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why.
He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries,
and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the
lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and
sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and
combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the
sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power
which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame
to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep,
and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the
small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had
the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men
almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the
shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as
it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples
crumbling against a sickly sky.
I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city—the great, the old, the
terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and
of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I
burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend
said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered
imaginings; that what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room
prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and that in the
sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never
been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it
hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which
others saw not.
It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the
restless crowds to see Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up
the endless stairs into the choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I
saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces peering from
behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against
blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space;
whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, cooling sun. Then
the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and
hair stood up on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came
out and squatted on the heads. And when I, who was colder and more
scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about “imposture”
and “static electricity”, Nyarlathotep drave us all out, down the dizzy
stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud
that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others
screamed with me for solace. We sware to one another that the city was
exactly the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began
to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the
queer faces we made.
I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for
when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious
involuntary formations and seemed to know our destinations though we
dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the
blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal
to shew where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone,
windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around
the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river, and
noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top.
Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a
different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left,
leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a
weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My
own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently felt a
chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the
dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows.
Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only,
where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column
seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I
lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was
frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a
disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was
slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half floated
between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the
sightless vortex of the unimaginable.
Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can
tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not
hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation,
corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that
brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds
vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified
temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy
vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this
revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of
drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from
inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding
and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the
gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless
gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.
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