object:1f.lovecraft - Out of the Aeons
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
for Hazel Heald
(Ms. found among the effects of the late Richard H. Johnson, Ph.D.,
curator of the Cabot Museum of Archaeology, Boston, Mass.)
It is not likely that anyone in Boston—or any alert reader
elsewhere—will ever forget the strange affair of the Cabot Museum. The
newspaper publicity given to that hellish mummy, the antique and
terrible rumours vaguely linked with it, the morbid wave of interest
and cult activities during 1932, and the frightful fate of the two
intruders on December 1st of that year, all combined to form one of
those classic mysteries which go down for generations as folklore and
become the nuclei of whole cycles of horrific speculation.
Everyone seems to realise, too, that something very vital and
unutterably hideous was suppressed in the public accounts of the
culminant horrors. Those first disquieting hints as to the condition of
one of the two bodies were dismissed and ignored too abruptly—nor were
the singular modifications in the mummy given the following-up which
their news value would normally prompt. It also struck people as queer
that the mummy was never restored to its case. In these days of expert
taxidermy the excuse that its disintegrating condition made exhibition
impracticable seemed a peculiarly lame one.
As curator of the museum I am in a position to reveal all the
suppressed facts, but this I shall not do during my lifetime. There are
things about the world and universe which it is better for the majority
not to know, and I have not departed from the opinion in which all of
us—museum staff, physicians, reporters, and police—concurred at the
period of the horror itself. At the same time it seems proper that a
matter of such overwhelming scientific and historic importance should
not remain wholly unrecorded—hence this account which I have prepared
for the benefit of serious students. I shall place it among various
papers to be examined after my death, leaving its fate to the
discretion of my executors. Certain threats and unusual events during
the past weeks have led me to believe that my life—as well as that of
other museum officials—is in some peril through the enmity of several
widespread secret cults of Asiatics, Polynesians, and heterogeneous
mystical devotees; hence it is possible that the work of the executors
may not be long postponed. [Executor’s note: Dr. Johnson died suddenly
and rather mysteriously of heart-failure on April 22, 1933. Wentworth
Moore, taxidermist of the museum, disappeared around the middle of the
preceding month. On February 18 of the same year Dr. William Minot, who
superintended a dissection connected with the case, was stabbed in the
back, dying the following day.]
The real beginning of the horror, I suppose, was in 1879—long before my
term as curator—when the museum acquired that ghastly, inexplicable
mummy from the Orient Shipping Company. Its very discovery was
monstrous and menacing, for it came from a crypt of unknown origin and
fabulous antiquity on a bit of land suddenly upheaved from the
Pacific’s floor.
On May 11, 1878, Capt. Charles Weatherbee of the freighter Eridanus,
bound from Wellington, New Zealand, to Valparaiso, Chile, had sighted a
new island unmarked on any chart and evidently of volcanic origin. It
projected quite boldly out of the sea in the form of a truncated cone.
A landing-party under Capt. Weatherbee noted evidences of long
submersion on the rugged slopes which they climbed, while at the summit
there were signs of recent destruction, as by an earthquake. Among the
scattered rubble were massive stones of manifestly artificial shaping,
and a little examination disclosed the presence of some of that
prehistoric Cyclopean masonry found on certain Pacific islands and
forming a perpetual archaeological puzzle.
Finally the sailors entered a massive stone crypt—judged to have been
part of a much larger edifice, and to have originally lain far
underground—in one corner of which the frightful mummy crouched. After
a short period of virtual panic, caused partly by certain carvings on
the walls, the men were induced to move the mummy to the ship, though
it was only with fear and loathing that they touched it. Close to the
body, as if once thrust into its clothes, was a cylinder of an unknown
metal containing a roll of thin, bluish-white membrane of equally
unknown nature, inscribed with peculiar characters in a greyish,
indeterminable pigment. In the centre of the vast stone floor was a
suggestion of a trap-door, but the party lacked apparatus sufficiently
powerful to move it.
The Cabot Museum, then newly established, saw the meagre reports of the
discovery and at once took steps to acquire the mummy and the cylinder.
Curator Pickman made a personal trip to Valparaiso and outfitted a
schooner to search for the crypt where the thing had been found, though
meeting with failure in this matter. At the recorded position of the
island nothing but the sea’s unbroken expanse could be discerned, and
the seekers realised that the same seismic forces which had suddenly
thrust the island up had carried it down again to the watery darkness
where it had brooded for untold aeons. The secret of that immovable
trap-door would never be solved. The mummy and the cylinder, however,
remained—and the former was placed on exhibition early in November,
1879, in the museum’s hall of mummies.
The Cabot Museum of Archaeology, which specialises in such remnants of
ancient and unknown civilisations as do not fall within the domain of
art, is a small and scarcely famous institution, though one of high
standing in scientific circles. It stands in the heart of Boston’s
exclusive Beacon Hill district—in Mt. Vernon Street, near Joy—housed in
a former private mansion with an added wing in the rear, and was a
source of pride to its austere neighbours until the recent terrible
events brought it an undesirable notoriety.
The hall of mummies on the western side of the original mansion (which
was designed by Bulfinch and erected in 1819), on the second floor, is
justly esteemed by historians and anthropologists as harbouring the
greatest collection of its kind in America. Here may be found typical
examples of Egyptian embalming from the earliest Sakkarah specimens to
the last Coptic attempts of the eighth century; mummies of other
cultures, including the prehistoric Indian specimens recently found in
the Aleutian Islands; agonised Pompeian figures moulded in plaster from
tragic hollows in the ruin-choking ashes; naturally mummified bodies
from mines and other excavations in all parts of the earth—some
surprised by their terrible entombment in the grotesque postures caused
by their last, tearing death-throes—everything, in short, which any
collection of the sort could well be expected to contain. In 1879, of
course, it was much less ample than it is now; yet even then it was
remarkable. But that shocking thing from the primal Cyclopean crypt on
an ephemeral sea-spawned island was always its chief attraction and
most impenetrable mystery.
The mummy was that of a medium-sized man of unknown race, and was cast
in a peculiar crouching posture. The face, half shielded by claw-like
hands, had its under jaw thrust far forward, while the shrivelled
features bore an expression of fright so hideous that few spectators
could view them unmoved. The eyes were closed, with lids clamped down
tightly over eyeballs apparently bulging and prominent. Bits of hair
and beard remained, and the colour of the whole was a sort of dull
neutral grey. In texture the thing was half leathery and half stony,
forming an insoluble enigma to those experts who sought to ascertain
how it was embalmed. In places bits of its substance were eaten away by
time and decay. Rags of some peculiar fabric, with suggestions of
unknown designs, still clung to the object.
Just what made it so infinitely horrible and repulsive one could hardly
say. For one thing, there was a subtle, indefinable sense of limitless
antiquity and utter alienage which affected one like a view from the
brink of a monstrous abyss of unplumbed blackness—but mostly it was the
expression of crazed fear on the puckered, prognathous, half-shielded
face. Such a symbol of infinite, inhuman, cosmic fright could not help
communicating the emotion to the beholder amidst a disquieting cloud of
mystery and vain conjecture.
Among the discriminating few who frequented the Cabot Museum this relic
of an elder, forgotten world soon acquired an unholy fame, though the
institution’s seclusion and quiet policy prevented it from becoming a
popular sensation of the “Cardiff Giant” sort. In the last century the
art of vulgar ballyhoo had not invaded the field of scholarship to the
extent it has now succeeded in doing. Naturally, savants of various
kinds tried their best to classify the frightful object, though always
without success. Theories of a bygone Pacific civilisation, of which
the Easter Island images and the megalithic masonry of Ponape and
Nan-Matol are conceivable vestiges, were freely circulated among
students, and learned journals carried varied and often conflicting
speculations on a possible former continent whose peaks survive as the
myriad islands of Melanesia and Polynesia. The diversity in dates
assigned to the hypothetical vanished culture—or continent—was at once
bewildering and amusing; yet some surprisingly relevant allusions were
found in certain myths of Tahiti and other islands.
Meanwhile the strange cylinder and its baffling scroll of unknown
hieroglyphs, carefully preserved in the museum library, received their
due share of attention. No question could exist as to their association
with the mummy; hence all realised that in the unravelling of their
mystery the mystery of the shrivelled horror would in all probability
be unravelled as well. The cylinder, about four inches long by
seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, was of a queerly iridescent metal
utterly defying chemical analysis and seemingly impervious to all
reagents. It was tightly fitted with a cap of the same substance, and
bore engraved figurings of an evidently decorative and possibly
symbolic nature—conventional designs which seemed to follow a
peculiarly alien, paradoxical, and doubtfully describable system of
geometry.
Not less mysterious was the scroll it contained—a neat roll of some
thin, bluish-white, unanalysable membrane, coiled round a slim rod of
metal like that of the cylinder, and unwinding to a length of some two
feet. The large, bold hieroglyphs, extending in a narrow line down the
centre of the scroll and penned or painted with a grey pigment defying
analysis, resembled nothing known to linguists and palaeographers, and
could not be deciphered despite the transmission of photographic copies
to every living expert in the given field.
It is true that a few scholars, unusually versed in the literature of
occultism and magic, found vague resemblances between some of the
hieroglyphs and certain primal symbols described or cited in two or
three very ancient, obscure, and esoteric texts such as the Book of
Eibon, reputed to descend from forgotten Hyperborea; the Pnakotic
fragments, alleged to be pre-human; and the monstrous and forbidden
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. None of these
resemblances, however, was beyond dispute; and because of the
prevailing low estimation of occult studies, no effort was made to
circulate copies of the hieroglyphs among mystical specialists. Had
such circulation occurred at this early date, the later history of the
case might have been very different; indeed, a glance at the
hieroglyphs by any reader of von Junzt’s horrible Nameless Cults would
have established a linkage of unmistakable significance. At this
period, however, the readers of that monstrous blasphemy were
exceedingly few; copies having been incredibly scarce in the interval
between the suppression of the original Düsseldorf edition (1839) and
of the Bridewell translation (1845) and the publication of the
expurgated reprint by the Golden Goblin Press in 1909. Practically
speaking, no occultist or student of the primal past’s esoteric lore
had his attention called to the strange scroll until the recent
outburst of sensational journalism which precipitated the horrible
climax.
II.
Thus matters glided along for a half-century following the installation
of the frightful mummy at the museum. The gruesome object had a local
celebrity among cultivated Bostonians, but no more than that; while the
very existence of the cylinder and scroll—after a decade of futile
research—was virtually forgotten. So quiet and conservative was the
Cabot Museum that no reporter or feature writer ever thought of
invading its uneventful precincts for rabble-tickling material.
The invasion of ballyhoo commenced in the spring of 1931, when a
purchase of somewhat spectacular nature—that of the strange objects and
inexplicably preserved bodies found in crypts beneath the almost
vanished and evilly famous ruins of Château Faussesflammes, in
Averoigne, France—brought the museum prominently into the news columns.
True to its “hustling” policy, the Boston Pillar sent a Sunday feature
writer to cover the incident and pad it with an exaggerated general
account of the institution itself; and this young man—Stuart Reynolds
by name—hit upon the nameless mummy as a potential sensation far
surpassing the recent acquisitions nominally forming his chief
assignment. A smattering of theosophical lore, and a fondness for the
speculations of such writers as Colonel Churchward and Lewis Spence
concerning lost continents and primal forgotten civilisations, made
Reynolds especially alert toward any aeonian relic like the unknown
mummy.
At the museum the reporter made himself a nuisance through constant and
not always intelligent questionings and endless demands for the
movement of encased objects to permit photographs from unusual angles.
In the basement library room he pored endlessly over the strange metal
cylinder and its membraneous scroll, photographing them from every
angle and securing pictures of every bit of the weird hieroglyphed
text. He likewise asked to see all books with any bearing whatever on
the subject of primal cultures and sunken continents—sitting for three
hours taking notes, and leaving only in order to hasten to Cambridge
for a sight (if permission were granted) of the abhorred and forbidden
Necronomicon at the Widener Library.
On April 5th the article appeared in the Sunday Pillar, smothered in
photographs of mummy, cylinder, and hieroglyphed scroll, and couched in
the peculiarly simpering, infantile style which the Pillar affects for
the benefit of its vast and mentally immature clientele. Full of
inaccuracies, exaggerations, and sensationalism, it was precisely the
sort of thing to stir the brainless and fickle interest of the herd—and
as a result the once quiet museum began to be swarmed with chattering
and vacuously staring throngs such as its stately corridors had never
known before.
There were scholarly and intelligent visitors, too, despite the
puerility of the article—the pictures had spoken for themselves—and
many persons of mature attainments sometimes see the Pillar by
accident. I recall one very strange character who appeared during
November—a dark, turbaned, and bushily bearded man with a laboured,
unnatural voice, curiously expressionless face, clumsy hands covered
with absurd white mittens, who gave a squalid West End address and
called himself “Swami Chandraputra”. This fellow was unbelievably
erudite in occult lore and seemed profoundly and solemnly moved by the
resemblance of the hieroglyphs on the scroll to certain signs and
symbols of a forgotten elder world about which he professed vast
intuitive knowledge.
By June, the fame of the mummy and scroll had leaked far beyond Boston,
and the museum had inquiries and requests for photographs from
occultists and students of arcana all over the world. This was not
altogether pleasing to our staff, since we are a scientific institution
without sympathy for fantastic dreamers; yet we answered all questions
with civility. One result of these catechisms was a highly learned
article in The Occult Review by the famous New Orleans mystic
Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, in which was asserted the complete identity
of some of the odd geometrical designs on the iridescent cylinder, and
of several of the hieroglyphs on the membraneous scroll, with certain
ideographs of horrible significance (transcribed from primal monoliths
or from the secret rituals of hidden bands of esoteric students and
devotees) reproduced in the hellish and suppressed Black Book or
Nameless Cults of von Junzt.
De Marigny recalled the frightful death of von Junzt in 1840, a year
after the publication of his terrible volume at Düsseldorf, and
commented on his blood-curdling and partly suspected sources of
information. Above all, he emphasised the enormous relevance of the
tales with which von Junzt linked most of the monstrous ideographs he
had reproduced. That these tales, in which a cylinder and scroll were
expressly mentioned, held a remarkable suggestion of relationship to
the things at the museum, no one could deny; yet they were of such
breath-taking extravagance—involving such unbelievable sweeps of time
and such fantastic anomalies of a forgotten elder world—that one could
much more easily admire than believe them.
Admire them the public certainly did, for copying in the press was
universal. Illustrated articles sprang up everywhere, telling or
purporting to tell the legends in the Black Book, expatiating on the
horror of the mummy, comparing the cylinder’s designs and the scroll’s
hieroglyphs with the figures reproduced by von Junzt, and indulging in
the wildest, most sensational, and most irrational theories and
speculations. Attendance at the museum was trebled, and the widespread
nature of the interest was attested by the plethora of mail on the
subject—most of it inane and superfluous—received at the museum.
Apparently the mummy and its origin formed—for imaginative people—a
close rival to the depression as chief topic of 1931 and 1932. For my
own part, the principal effect of the furore was to make me read von
Junzt’s monstrous volume in the Golden Goblin edition—a perusal which
left me dizzy and nauseated, yet thankful that I had not seen the utter
infamy of the unexpurgated text.
III.
The archaic whispers reflected in the Black Book, and linked with
designs and symbols so closely akin to what the mysterious scroll and
cylinder bore, were indeed of a character to hold one spellbound and
not a little awestruck. Leaping an incredible gulf of time—behind all
the civilisations, races, and lands we know—they clustered round a
vanished nation and a vanished continent of the misty, fabulous
dawn-years . . . that to which legend has given the name of Mu, and
which old tablets in the primal Naacal tongue speak of as flourishing
200,000 years ago, when Europe harboured only hybrid entities, and lost
Hyperborea knew the nameless worship of black amorphous Tsathoggua.
There was mention of a kingdom or province called K’naa in a very
ancient land where the first human people had found monstrous ruins
left by those who had dwelt there before—vague waves of unknown
entities which had filtered down from the stars and lived out their
aeons on a forgotten, nascent world. K’naa was a sacred place, since
from its midst the bleak basalt cliffs of Mount Yaddith-Gho soared
starkly into the sky, topped by a gigantic fortress of Cyclopean stone,
infinitely older than mankind and built by the alien spawn of the dark
planet Yuggoth, which had colonised the earth before the birth of
terrestrial life.
The spawn of Yuggoth had perished aeons before, but had left behind
them one monstrous and terrible living thing which could never
die—their hellish god or patron daemon Ghatanothoa, which lowered and
brooded eternally though unseen in the crypts beneath that fortress on
Yaddith-Gho. No human creature had ever climbed Yaddith-Gho or seen
that blasphemous fortress except as a distant and geometrically
abnormal outline against the sky; yet most agreed that Ghatanothoa was
still there, wallowing and burrowing in unsuspected abysses beneath the
megalithic walls. There were always those who believed that sacrifices
must be made to Ghatanothoa, lest it crawl out of its hidden abysses
and waddle horribly through the world of men as it had once waddled
through the primal world of the Yuggoth-spawn.
People said that if no victims were offered, Ghatanothoa would ooze up
to the light of day and lumber down the basalt cliffs of Yaddith-Gho
bringing doom to all it might encounter. For no living thing could
behold Ghatanothoa, or even a perfect graven image of Ghatanothoa,
however small, without suffering a change more horrible than death
itself. Sight of the god, or its image, as all the legends of the
Yuggoth-spawn agreed, meant paralysis and petrifaction of a singularly
shocking sort, in which the victim was turned to stone and leather on
the outside, while the brain within remained perpetually alive—horribly
fixed and prisoned through the ages, and maddeningly conscious of the
passage of interminable epochs of helpless inaction till chance and
time might complete the decay of the petrified shell and leave it
exposed to die. Most brains, of course, would go mad long before this
aeon-deferred release could arrive. No human eyes, it was said, had
ever glimpsed Ghatanothoa, though the danger was as great now as it had
been for the Yuggoth-spawn.
And so there was a cult in K’naa which worshipped Ghatanothoa and each
year sacrificed to it twelve young warriors and twelve young maidens.
These victims were offered up on flaming altars in the marble temple
near the mountain’s base, for none dared climb Yaddith-Gho’s basalt
cliffs or draw near to the Cyclopean pre-human stronghold on its crest.
Vast was the power of the priests of Ghatanothoa, since upon them alone
depended the preservation of K’naa and of all the land of Mu from the
petrifying emergence of Ghatanothoa out of its unknown burrows.
There were in the land an hundred priests of the Dark God, under
Imash-Mo the High-Priest, who walked before King Thabon at the
Nath-feast, and stood proudly whilst the King knelt at the Dhoric
shrine. Each priest had a marble house, a chest of gold, two hundred
slaves, and an hundred concubines, besides immunity from civil law and
the power of life and death over all in K’naa save the priests of the
King. Yet in spite of these defenders there was ever a fear in the land
lest Ghatanothoa slither up from the depths and lurch viciously down
the mountain to bring horror and petrification to mankind. In the
latter years the priests forbade men even to guess or imagine what its
frightful aspect might be.
It was in the Year of the Red Moon (estimated as B. C. 173,148 by von
Junzt) that a human being first dared to breathe defiance against
Ghatanothoa and its nameless menace. This bold heretic was T’yog,
High-Priest of Shub-Niggurath and guardian of the copper temple of the
Goat with a Thousand Young. T’yog had thought long on the powers of the
various gods, and had had strange dreams and revelations touching the
life of this and earlier worlds. In the end he felt sure that the gods
friendly to man could be arrayed against the hostile gods, and believed
that Shub-Niggurath, Nug, and Yeb, as well as Yig the Serpent-god, were
ready to take sides with man against the tyranny and presumption of
Ghatanothoa.
Inspired by the Mother Goddess, T’yog wrote down a strange formula in
the hieratic Naacal of his order, which he believed would keep the
possessor immune from the Dark God’s petrifying power. With this
protection, he reflected, it might be possible for a bold man to climb
the dreaded basalt cliffs and—first of all human beings—enter the
Cyclopean fortress beneath which Ghatanothoa reputedly brooded. Face to
face with the god, and with the power of Shub-Niggurath and her sons on
his side, T’yog believed that he might be able to bring it to terms and
at last deliver mankind from its brooding menace. With humanity freed
through his efforts, there would be no limits to the honours he might
claim. All the honours of the priests of Ghatanothoa would perforce be
transferred to him; and even kingship or godhood might conceivably be
within his reach.
So T’yog wrote his protective formula on a scroll of pthagon membrane
(according to von Junzt, the inner skin of the extinct yakith-lizard)
and enclosed it in a carven cylinder of lagh metal—the metal brought by
the Elder Ones from Yuggoth, and found in no mine of earth. This charm,
carried in his robe, would make him proof against the menace of
Ghatanothoa—it would even restore the Dark God’s petrified victims if
that monstrous entity should ever emerge and begin its devastations.
Thus he proposed to go up the shunned and man-untrodden mountain,
invade the alien-angled citadel of Cyclopean stone, and confront the
shocking devil-entity in its lair. Of what would follow, he could not
even guess; but the hope of being mankind’s saviour lent strength to
his will.
He had, however, reckoned without the jealousy and self-interest of
Ghatanothoa’s pampered priests. No sooner did they hear of his plan
than—fearful for their prestige and privilege in case the Daemon-God
should be dethroned—they set up a frantic clamour against the so-called
sacrilege, crying that no man might prevail against Ghatanothoa, and
that any effort to seek it out would merely provoke it to a hellish
onslaught against mankind which no spell or priestcraft could hope to
avert. With those cries they hoped to turn the public mind against
T’yog; yet such was the people’s yearning for freedom from Ghatanothoa,
and such their confidence in the skill and zeal of T’yog, that all the
protestations came to naught. Even the King, usually a puppet of the
priests, refused to forbid T’yog’s daring pilgrimage.
It was then that the priests of Ghatanothoa did by stealth what they
could not do openly. One night Imash-Mo, the High-Priest, stole to
T’yog in his temple chamber and took from his sleeping form the metal
cylinder; silently drawing out the potent scroll and putting in its
place another scroll of great similitude, yet varied enough to have no
power against any god or daemon. When the cylinder was slipped back
into the sleeper’s cloak Imash-Mo was content, for he knew T’yog was
little likely to study that cylinder’s contents again. Thinking himself
protected by the true scroll, the heretic would march up the forbidden
mountain and into the Evil Presence—and Ghatanothoa, unchecked by any
magic, would take care of the rest.
It would no longer be needful for Ghatanothoa’s priests to preach
against the defiance. Let T’yog go his way and meet his doom. And
secretly, the priests would always cherish the stolen scroll—the true
and potent charm—handing it down from one High-Priest to another for
use in any dim future when it might be needful to contravene the
Devil-God’s will. So the rest of the night Imash-Mo slept in great
peace, with the true scroll in a new cylinder fashioned for its
harbourage.
It was dawn on the Day of the Sky-Flames (nomenclature undefined by von
Junzt) that T’yog, amidst the prayers and chanting of the people and
with King Thabon’s blessing on his head, started up the dreaded
mountain with a staff of tlath-wood in his right hand. Within his robe
was the cylinder holding what he thought to be the true charm—for he
had indeed failed to find out the imposture. Nor did he see any irony
in the prayers which Imash-Mo and the other priests of Ghatanothoa
intoned for his safety and success.
All that morning the people stood and watched as T’yog’s dwindling form
struggled up the shunned basalt slope hitherto alien to men’s
footsteps, and many stayed watching long after he had vanished where a
perilous ledge led round to the mountain’s hidden side. That night a
few sensitive dreamers thought they heard a faint tremor convulsing the
hated peak; though most ridiculed them for the statement. Next day vast
crowds watched the mountain and prayed, and wondered how soon T’yog
would return. And so the next day, and the next. For weeks they hoped
and waited, and then they wept. Nor did anyone ever see T’yog, who
would have saved mankind from fears, again.
Thereafter men shuddered at T’yog’s presumption, and tried not to think
of the punishment his impiety had met. And the priests of Ghatanothoa
smiled to those who might resent the god’s will or challenge its right
to the sacrifices. In later years the ruse of Imash-Mo became known to
the people; yet the knowledge availed not to change the general feeling
that Ghatanothoa were better left alone. None ever dared to defy it
again. And so the ages rolled on, and King succeeded King, and
High-Priest succeeded High-Priest, and nations rose and decayed, and
lands rose above the sea and returned into the sea. And with many
millennia decay fell upon K’naa—till at last on a hideous day of storm
and thunder, terrific rumbling, and mountain-high waves, all the land
of Mu sank into the sea forever.
Yet down the later aeons thin streams of ancient secrets trickled. In
distant lands there met together grey-faced fugitives who had survived
the sea-fiend’s rage, and strange skies drank the smoke of altars
reared to vanished gods and daemons. Though none knew to what
bottomless deep the sacred peak and Cyclopean fortress of dreaded
Ghatanothoa had sunk, there were still those who mumbled its name and
offered to it nameless sacrifices lest it bubble up through leagues of
ocean and shamble among men spreading horror and petrifaction.
Around the scattered priests grew the rudiments of a dark and secret
cult—secret because the people of the new lands had other gods and
devils, and thought only evil of elder and alien ones—and within that
cult many hideous things were done, and many strange objects cherished.
It was whispered that a certain line of elusive priests still harboured
the true charm against Ghatanothoa which Imash-Mo stole from the
sleeping T’yog; though none remained who could read or understand the
cryptic syllables, or who could even guess in what part of the world
the lost K’naa, the dreaded peak of Yaddith-Gho, and the titan fortress
of the Devil-God had lain.
Though it flourished chiefly in those Pacific regions around which Mu
itself had once stretched, there were rumours of the hidden and
detested cult of Ghatanothoa in ill-fated Atlantis, and on the abhorred
plateau of Leng. Von Junzt implied its presence in the fabled
subterrene kingdom of K’n-yan, and gave clear evidence that it had
penetrated Egypt, Chaldaea, Persia, China, the forgotten Semite empires
of Africa, and Mexico and Peru in the New World. That it had a strong
connexion with the witchcraft movement in Europe, against which the
bulls of popes were vainly directed, he more than strongly hinted. The
West, however, was never favourable to its growth; and public
indignation—aroused by glimpses of hideous rites and nameless
sacrifices—wholly stamped out many of its branches. In the end it
became a hunted, doubly furtive underground affair—yet never could its
nucleus be quite exterminated. It always survived somehow, chiefly in
the Far East and on the Pacific Islands, where its teachings became
merged into the esoteric lore of the Polynesian Areoi.
Von Junzt gave subtle and disquieting hints of actual contact with the
cult; so that as I read I shuddered at what was rumoured about his
death. He spoke of the growth of certain ideas regarding the appearance
of the Devil-God—a creature which no human being (unless it were the
too-daring T’yog, who had never returned) had ever seen—and contrasted
this habit of speculation with the taboo prevailing in ancient Mu
against any attempt to imagine what the horror looked like. There was a
peculiar fearfulness about the devotees’ awed and fascinated whispers
on this subject—whispers heavy with morbid curiosity concerning the
precise nature of what T’yog might have confronted in that frightful
pre-human edifice on the dreaded and now-sunken mountains before the
end (if it was an end) finally came—and I felt oddly disturbed by the
German scholar’s oblique and insidious references to this topic.
Scarcely less disturbing were von Junzt’s conjectures on the
whereabouts of the stolen scroll of cantrips against Ghatanothoa, and
on the ultimate uses to which this scroll might be put. Despite all my
assurance that the whole matter was purely mythical, I could not help
shivering at the notion of a latter-day emergence of the monstrous god,
and at the picture of an humanity turned suddenly to a race of abnormal
statues, each encasing a living brain doomed to inert and helpless
consciousness for untold aeons of futurity. The old Düsseldorf savant
had a poisonous way of suggesting more than he stated, and I could
understand why his damnable book was suppressed in so many countries as
blasphemous, dangerous, and unclean.
I writhed with repulsion, yet the thing exerted an unholy fascination;
and I could not lay it down till I had finished it. The alleged
reproductions of designs and ideographs from Mu were marvellously and
startlingly like the markings on the strange cylinder and the
characters on the scroll, and the whole account teemed with details
having vague, irritating suggestions of resemblance to things connected
with the hideous mummy. The cylinder and scroll—the Pacific setting—the
persistent notion of old Capt. Weatherbee that the Cyclopean crypt
where the mummy was found had once lain under a vast building . . .
somehow I was vaguely glad that the volcanic island had sunk before
that massive suggestion of a trap-door could be opened.
IV.
What I read in the Black Book formed a fiendishly apt preparation for
the news items and closer events which began to force themselves upon
me in the spring of 1932. I can scarcely recall just when the
increasingly frequent reports of police action against the odd and
fantastical religious cults in the Orient and elsewhere commenced to
impress me; but by May or June I realised that there was, all over the
world, a surprising and unwonted burst of activity on the part of
bizarre, furtive, and esoteric mystical organisations ordinarily
quiescent and seldom heard from.
It is not likely that I would have connected these reports with either
the hints of von Junzt or the popular furore over the mummy and
cylinder in the museum, but for certain significant syllables and
persistent resemblances—sensationally dwelt upon by the press—in the
rites and speeches of the various secret celebrants brought to public
attention. As it was, I could not help remarking with disquiet the
frequent recurrence of a name—in various corrupt forms—which seemed to
constitute a focal point of all the cult worship, and which was
obviously regarded with a singular mixture of reverence and terror.
Some of the forms quoted were G’tanta, Tanotah, Than-Tha, Gatan, and
Ktan-Tah—and it did not require the suggestions of my now numerous
occultist correspondents to make me see in these variants a hideous and
suggestive kinship to the monstrous name rendered by von Junzt as
Ghatanothoa.
There were other disquieting features, too. Again and again the reports
cited vague, awestruck references to a “true scroll”—something on which
tremendous consequences seemed to hinge, and which was mentioned as
being in the custody of a certain “Nagob”, whoever and whatever he
might be. Likewise, there was an insistent repetition of a name which
sounded like Tog, Tiok, Yog, Zob, or Yob, and which my more and more
excited consciousness involuntarily linked with the name of the hapless
heretic T’yog as given in the Black Book. This name was usually uttered
in connexion with such cryptical phrases as “It is none other than he”,
“He had looked upon its face”, “He knows all, though he can neither see
nor feel”, “He has brought the memory down through the aeons”, “The
true scroll will release him”, “Nagob has the true scroll”, “He can
tell where to find it”.
Something very queer was undoubtedly in the air, and I did not wonder
when my occultist correspondents, as well as the sensational Sunday
papers, began to connect the new abnormal stirrings with the legends of
Mu on the one hand, and with the frightful mummy’s recent exploitation
on the other hand. The widespread articles in the first wave of press
publicity, with their insistent linkage of the mummy, cylinder, and
scroll with the tale in the Black Book, and their crazily fantastic
speculations about the whole matter, might very well have roused the
latent fanaticism in hundreds of those furtive groups of exotic
devotees with which our complex world abounds. Nor did the papers cease
adding fuel to the flames—for the stories on the cult-stirrings were
even wilder than the earlier series of yarns.
As the summer drew on, attendants noticed a curious new element among
the throngs of visitors which—after a lull following the first burst of
publicity—were again drawn to the museum by the second furore. More and
more frequently there were persons of strange and exotic aspect—swarthy
Asiatics, long-haired nondescripts, and bearded brown men who seemed
unused to European clothes—who would invariably inquire for the hall of
mummies and would subsequently be found staring at the hideous Pacific
specimen in a veritable ecstasy of fascination. Some quiet, sinister
undercurrent in this flood of eccentric foreigners seemed to impress
all the guards, and I myself was far from undisturbed. I could not help
thinking of the prevailing cult-stirrings among just such exotics as
these—and the connexion of those stirrings with myths all too close to
the frightful mummy and its cylinder scroll.
At times I was half tempted to withdraw the mummy from
exhibition—especially when an attendant told me that he had several
times glimpsed strangers making odd obeisances before it, and had
overheard sing-song mutterings which sounded like chants or rituals
addressed to it at hours when the visiting throngs were somewhat
thinned. One of the guards acquired a queer nervous hallucination about
the petrified horror in the lone glass case, alleging that he could see
from day to day certain vague, subtle, and infinitely slight changes in
the frantic flexion of the bony claws, and in the fear-crazed
expression of the leathery face. He could not get rid of the loathsome
idea that those horrible, bulging eyes were about to pop suddenly open.
It was early in September, when the curious crowds had lessened and the
hall of mummies was sometimes vacant, that the attempt to get at the
mummy by cutting the glass of its case was made. The culprit, a swarthy
Polynesian, was spied in time by a guard, and was overpowered before
any damage occurred. Upon investigation the fellow turned out to be an
Hawaiian notorious for his activity in certain underground religious
cults, and having a considerable police record in connexion with
abnormal and inhuman rites and sacrifices. Some of the papers found in
his room were highly puzzling and disturbing, including many sheets
covered with hieroglyphs closely resembling those on the scroll at the
museum and in the Black Book of von Junzt; but regarding these things
he could not be prevailed upon to speak.
Scarcely a week after this incident, another attempt to get at the
mummy—this time by tampering with the lock of his case—resulted in a
second arrest. The offender, a Cingalese, had as long and unsavoury a
record of loathsome cult activities as the Hawaiian had possessed, and
displayed a kindred unwillingness to talk to the police. What made this
case doubly and darkly interesting was that a guard had noticed this
man several times before, and had heard him addressing to the mummy a
peculiar chant containing unmistakable repetitions of the word “T’yog”.
As a result of this affair I doubled the guards in the hall of mummies,
and ordered them never to leave the now notorious specimen out of
sight, even for a moment.
As may well be imagined, the press made much of these two incidents,
reviewing its talk of primal and fabulous Mu, and claiming boldly that
the hideous mummy was none other than the daring heretic T’yog,
petrified by something he had seen in the pre-human citadel he had
invaded, and preserved intact through 175,000 years of our planet’s
turbulent history. That the strange devotees represented cults
descended from Mu, and that they were worshipping the mummy—or perhaps
even seeking to awaken it to life by spells and incantations—was
emphasised and reiterated in the most sensational fashion.
Writers exploited the insistence of the old legends that the brain of
Ghatanothoa’s petrified victims remained conscious and unaffected—a
point which served as a basis for the wildest and most improbable
speculations. The mention of a “true scroll” also received due
attention—it being the prevailing popular theory that T’yog’s stolen
charm against Ghatanothoa was somewhere in existence, and that
cult-members were trying to bring it into contact with T’yog himself
for some purpose of their own. One result of this exploitation was that
a third wave of gaping visitors began flooding the museum and staring
at the hellish mummy which served as a nucleus for the whole strange
and disturbing affair.
It was among this wave of spectators—many of whom made repeated
visits—that talk of the mummy’s vaguely changing aspect first began to
be widespread. I suppose—despite the disturbing notion of the nervous
guard some months before—that the museum’s personnel was too well used
to the constant sight of odd shapes to pay close attention to details;
in any case, it was the excited whispers of visitors which at length
aroused the guards to the subtle mutation which was apparently in
progress. Almost simultaneously the press got hold of it—with blatant
results which can well be imagined.
Naturally, I gave the matter my most careful observation, and by the
middle of October decided that a definite disintegration of the mummy
was under way. Through some chemical or physical influence in the air,
the half-stony, half-leathery fibres seemed to be gradually relaxing,
causing distinct variations in the angles of the limbs and in certain
details of the fear-twisted facial expression. After a half-century of
perfect preservation this was a highly disconcerting development, and I
had the museum’s taxidermist, Dr. Moore, go carefully over the gruesome
object several times. He reported a general relaxation and softening,
and gave the thing two or three astringent sprayings, but did not dare
to attempt anything drastic lest there be a sudden crumbling and
accelerated decay.
The effect of all this upon the gaping crowds was curious. Heretofore
each new sensation sprung by the press had brought fresh waves of
staring and whispering visitors, but now—though the papers blathered
endlessly about the mummy’s changes—the public seemed to have acquired
a definite sense of fear which outranked even its morbid curiosity.
People seemed to feel that a sinister aura hovered over the museum, and
from a high peak the attendance fell to a level distinctly below
normal. This lessened attendance gave added prominence to the stream of
freakish foreigners who continued to infest the place, and whose
numbers seemed in no way diminished.
On November 18th a Peruvian of Indian blood suffered a strange
hysterical or epileptic seizure in front of the mummy, afterward
shrieking from his hospital cot, “It tried to open its eyes!—T’yog
tried to open his eyes and stare at me!” I was by this time on the
point of removing the object from exhibition, but permitted myself to
be overruled at a meeting of our very conservative directors. However,
I could see that the museum was beginning to acquire an unholy
reputation in its austere and quiet neighbourhood. After this incident
I gave instructions that no one be allowed to pause before the
monstrous Pacific relic for more than a few minutes at a time.
It was on November 24th, after the museum’s five o’clock closing, that
one of the guards noticed a minute opening of the mummy’s eyes. The
phenomenon was very slight—nothing but a thin crescent of cornea being
visible in either eye—but it was none the less of the highest interest.
Dr. Moore, having been summoned hastily, was about to study the exposed
bits of eyeball with a magnifier when his handling of the mummy caused
the leathery lids to fall tightly shut again. All gentle efforts to
open them failed, and the taxidermist did not dare to apply drastic
measures. When he notified me of all this by telephone I felt a sense
of mounting dread hard to reconcile with the apparently simple event
concerned. For a moment I could share the popular impression that some
evil, amorphous blight from unplumbed deeps of time and space hung
murkily and menacingly over the museum.
Two nights later a sullen Filipino was trying to secrete himself in the
museum at closing time. Arrested and taken to the station, he refused
even to give his name, and was detained as a suspicious person.
Meanwhile the strict surveillance of the mummy seemed to discourage the
odd hordes of foreigners from haunting it. At least, the number of
exotic visitors distinctly fell off after the enforcement of the “move
along” order.
It was during the early morning hours of Thursday, December 1st, that a
terrible climax developed. At about one o’clock horrible screams of
mortal fright and agony were heard issuing from the museum, and a
series of frantic telephone calls from neighbours brought to the scene
quickly and simultaneously a squad of police and several museum
officials, including myself. Some of the policemen surrounded the
building while others, with the officials, cautiously entered. In the
main corridor we found the night watchman strangled to death—a bit of
East Indian hemp still knotted around his neck—and realised that
despite all precautions some darkly evil intruder or intruders had
gained access to the place. Now, however, a tomb-like silence enfolded
everything and we almost feared to advance upstairs to the fateful wing
where we knew the core of the trouble must lurk. We felt a bit more
steadied after flooding the building with light from the central
switches in the corridor, and finally crept reluctantly up the curving
staircase and through a lofty archway to the hall of mummies.
V.
It is from this point onward that reports of the hideous case have been
censored—for we have all agreed that no good can be accomplished by a
public knowledge of those terrestrial conditions implied by the further
developments. I have said that we flooded the whole building with light
before our ascent. Now beneath the beams that beat down on the
glistening cases and their gruesome contents, we saw outspread a mute
horror whose baffling details testified to happenings utterly beyond
our comprehension. There were two intruders—who we afterward agreed
must have hidden in the building before closing time—but they would
never be executed for the watchman’s murder. They had already paid the
penalty.
One was a Burmese and the other a Fiji-Islander—both known to the
police for their share in frightful and repulsive cult activities. They
were dead, and the more we examined them the more utterly monstrous and
unnamable we felt their manner of death to be. On both faces was a more
wholly frantic and inhuman look of fright than even the oldest
policeman had ever seen before; yet in the state of the two bodies
there were vast and significant differences.
The Burmese lay collapsed close to the nameless mummy’s case, from
which a square of glass had been neatly cut. In his right hand was a
scroll of bluish membrane which I at once saw was covered with greyish
hieroglyphs—almost a duplicate of the scroll in the strange cylinder in
the library downstairs, though later study brought out subtle
differences. There was no mark of violence on the body, and in view of
the desperate, agonised expression on the twisted face we could only
conclude that the man died of sheer fright.
It was the closely adjacent Fijian, though, that gave us the
profoundest shock. One of the policemen was the first to feel of him,
and the cry of fright he emitted added another shudder to that
neighbourhood’s night of terror. We ought to have known from the lethal
greyness of the once-black, fear-twisted face, and of the bony
hands—one of which still clutched an electric torch—that something was
hideously wrong; yet every one of us was unprepared for what that
officer’s hesitant touch disclosed. Even now I can think of it only
with a paroxysm of dread and repulsion. To be brief—the hapless
invader, who less than an hour before had been a sturdy living
Melanesian bent on unknown evils, was now a rigid, ash-grey figure of
stony, leathery petrification, in every respect identical with the
crouching, aeon-old blasphemy in the violated glass case.
Yet that was not the worst. Crowning all other horrors, and indeed
seizing our shocked attention before we turned to the bodies on the
floor, was the state of the frightful mummy. No longer could its
changes be called vague and subtle, for it had now made radical shifts
of posture. It had sagged and slumped with a curious loss of rigidity;
its bony claws had sunk until they no longer even partly covered its
leathery, fear-crazed face; and—God help us!—its hellish bulging eyes
had popped wide open, and seemed to be staring directly at the two
intruders who had died of fright or worse.
That ghastly, dead-fish stare was hideously mesmerising, and it haunted
us all the time we were examining the bodies of the invaders. Its
effect on our nerves was damnably queer, for we somehow felt a curious
rigidity creeping over us and hampering our simplest motions—a rigidity
which later vanished very oddly when we passed the hieroglyphed scroll
around for inspection. Every now and then I felt my gaze drawn
irresistibly toward those horrible bulging eyes in the case, and when I
returned to study them after viewing the bodies I thought I detected
something very singular about the glassy surface of the dark and
marvellously well-preserved pupils. The more I looked, the more
fascinated I became; and at last I went down to the office—despite that
strange stiffness in my limbs—and brought up a strong multiple
magnifying glass. With this I commenced a very close and careful survey
of the fishy pupils, while the others crowded expectantly around.
I had always been rather sceptical of the theory that scenes and
objects become photographed on the retina of the eye in cases of death
or coma; yet no sooner did I look through the lens than I realised the
presence of some sort of image other than the room’s reflection in the
glassy, bulging optics of this nameless spawn of the aeons. Certainly,
there was a dimly outlined scene on the age-old retinal surface, and I
could not doubt that it formed the last thing on which those eyes had
looked in life—countless millennia ago. It seemed to be steadily
fading, and I fumbled with the magnifier in order to shift another lens
into place. Yet it must have been accurate and clear-cut, even if
infinitesimally small, when—in response to some evil spell or act
connected with their visit—it had confronted those intruders who were
frightened to death. With the extra lens I could make out many details
formerly invisible, and the awed group around me hung on the flood of
words with which I tried to tell what I saw.
For here, in the year 1932, a man in the city of Boston was looking on
something which belonged to an unknown and utterly alien world—a world
that vanished from existence and normal memory aeons ago. There was a
vast room—a chamber of Cyclopean masonry—and I seemed to be viewing it
from one of its corners. On the walls were carvings so hideous that
even in this imperfect image their stark blasphemousness and bestiality
sickened me. I could not believe that the carvers of these things were
human, or that they had ever seen human beings when they shaped the
frightful outlines which leered at the beholder. In the centre of the
chamber was a colossal trap-door of stone, pushed upward to permit the
emergence of some object from below. The object should have been
clearly visible—indeed, must have been when the eyes first opened
before the fear-stricken intruders—though under my lenses it was merely
a monstrous blur.
As it happened, I was studying the right eye only when I brought the
extra magnification into play. A moment later I wished fervently that
my search had ended there. As it was, however, the zeal of discovery
and revelation was upon me, and I shifted my powerful lenses to the
mummy’s left eye in the hope of finding the image less faded on that
retina. My hands, trembling with excitement and unnaturally stiff from
some obscure influence, were slow in bringing the magnifier into focus,
but a moment later I realised that the image was less faded than in the
other eye. I saw in a morbid flash of half-distinctness the
insufferable thing which was welling up through the prodigious
trap-door in that Cyclopean, immemorially archaic crypt of a lost
world—and fell fainting with an inarticulate shriek of which I am not
even ashamed.
By the time I revived there was no distinct image of anything in either
eye of the monstrous mummy. Sergeant Keefe of the police looked with my
glass, for I could not bring myself to face that abnormal entity again.
And I thanked all the powers of the cosmos that I had not looked
earlier than I did. It took all my resolution, and a great deal of
solicitation, to make me relate what I had glimpsed in the hideous
moment of revelation. Indeed, I could not speak till we had all
adjourned to the office below, out of sight of that daemoniac thing
which could not be. For I had begun to harbour the most terrible and
fantastic notions about the mummy and its glassy, bulging eyes—that it
had a kind of hellish consciousness, seeing all that occurred before it
and trying vainly to communicate some frightful message from the gulfs
of time. That meant madness—but at last I thought I might be better off
if I told what I had half seen.
After all, it was not a long thing to tell. Oozing and surging up out
of that yawning trap-door in the Cyclopean crypt I had glimpsed such an
unbelievable behemothic monstrosity that I could not doubt the power of
its original to kill with its mere sight. Even now I cannot begin to
suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it
gigantic—tentacled—proboscidian—octopus-eyed—semi-amorphous—plastic—par
tly squamous and partly rugose—ugh! But nothing I could say could even
adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and
hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of black chaos
and illimitable night. As I write these words the associated mental
image causes me to lean back faint and nauseated. As I told of the
sight to the men around me in the office, I had to fight to preserve
the consciousness I had regained.
Nor were my hearers much less moved. Not a man spoke above a whisper
for a full quarter-hour, and there were awed, half-furtive references
to the frightful lore in the Black Book, to the recent newspaper tales
of cult-stirrings, and to the sinister events in the museum.
Ghatanothoa . . . Even its smallest perfect image could
petrify—T’yog—the false scroll—he never came back—the true scroll which
could fully or partly undo the petrification—did it survive?—the
hellish cults—the phrases overheard—“It is none other than he”—“He had
looked upon its face”—“He knows all, though he can neither see nor
feel”—“He had brought the memory down through the aeons”—“The true
scroll will release him”—“Nagob has the true scroll”—“He can tell where
to find it.” Only the healing greyness of the dawn brought us back to
sanity; a sanity which made of that glimpse of mine a closed
topic—something not to be explained or thought of again.
We gave out only partial reports to the press, and later on coöperated
with the papers in making other suppressions. For example, when the
autopsy shewed the brain and several other internal organs of the
petrified Fijian to be fresh and unpetrified, though hermetically
sealed by the petrification of the exterior flesh—an anomaly about
which physicians are still guardedly and bewilderedly debating—we did
not wish a furore to be started. We knew too well what the yellow
journals, remembering what was said of the intact-brained and
still-conscious state of Ghatanothoa’s stony-leathery victims, would
make of this detail.
As matters stood, they pointed out that the man who had held the
hieroglyphed scroll—and who had evidently thrust it at the mummy
through the opening in the case—was not petrified, while the man who
had not held it was. When they demanded that we make certain
experiments—applying the scroll both to the stony-leathery body of the
Fijian and to the mummy itself—we indignantly refused to abet such
superstitious notions. Of course, the mummy was withdrawn from public
view and transferred to the museum laboratory awaiting a really
scientific examination before some suitable medical authority.
Remembering past events, we kept it under a strict guard; but even so,
an attempt was made to enter the museum at 2:25 a.m. on December 5th.
Prompt working of the burglar alarm frustrated the design, though
unfortunately the criminal or criminals escaped.
That no hint of anything further ever reached the public, I am
profoundly thankful. I wish devoutly that there were nothing more to
tell. There will, of course, be leaks, and if anything happens to me I
do not know what my executors will do with this manuscript; but at
least the case will not be painfully fresh in the multitude’s memory
when the revelation comes. Besides, no one will believe the facts when
they are finally told. That is the curious thing about the multitude.
When their yellow press makes hints, they are ready to swallow
anything; but when a stupendous and abnormal revelation is actually
made, they laugh it aside as a lie. For the sake of general sanity it
is probably better so.
I have said that a scientific examination of the frightful mummy was
planned. This took place on December 8th, exactly a week after the
hideous culmination of events, and was conducted by the eminent Dr.
William Minot, in conjunction with Wentworth Moore, Sc.D., taxidermist
of the museum. Dr. Minot had witnessed the autopsy of the oddly
petrified Fijian the week before. There were also present Messrs.
Lawrence Cabot and Dudley Saltonstall of the museum’s trustees, Drs.
Mason, Wells, and Carver of the museum staff, two representatives of
the press, and myself. During the week the condition of the hideous
specimen had not visibly changed, though some relaxation of its fibres
caused the position of the glassy, open eyes to shift slightly from
time to time. All of the staff dreaded to look at the thing—for its
suggestion of quiet, conscious watching had become intolerable—and it
was only with an effort that I could bring myself to attend the
examination.
Dr. Minot arrived shortly after 1:00 p.m., and within a few minutes
began his survey of the mummy. Considerable disintegration took place
under his hands, and in view of this—and of what we told him concerning
the gradual relaxation of the specimen since the first of October—he
decided that a thorough dissection ought to be made before the
substance was further impaired. The proper instruments being present in
the laboratory equipment, he began at once; exclaiming aloud at the
odd, fibrous nature of the grey, mummified substance.
But his exclamation was still louder when he made the first deep
incision, for out of that cut there slowly trickled a thick crimson
stream whose nature—despite the infinite ages dividing this hellish
mummy’s lifetime from the present—was utterly unmistakable. A few more
deft strokes revealed various organs in astonishing degrees of
non-petrified preservation—all, indeed, being intact except where
injuries to the petrified exterior had brought about malformation or
destruction. The resemblance of this condition to that found in the
fright-killed Fiji-Islander was so strong that the eminent physician
gasped in bewilderment. The perfection of those ghastly bulging eyes
was uncanny, and their exact state with respect to petrification was
very difficult to determine.
At 3:30 p.m. the brain-case was opened—and ten minutes later our
stunned group took an oath of secrecy which only such guarded documents
as this manuscript will ever modify. Even the two reporters were glad
to confirm the silence. For the opening had revealed a pulsing, living
brain.
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