object:1f.lovecraft - Under the Pyramids
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
for Harry Houdini
Mystery attracts mystery. Ever since the wide appearance of my name as
a performer of unexplained feats, I have encountered strange narratives
and events which my calling has led people to link with my interests
and activities. Some of these have been trivial and irrelevant, some
deeply dramatic and absorbing, some productive of weird and perilous
experiences, and some involving me in extensive scientific and
historical research. Many of these matters I have told and shall
continue to tell freely; but there is one of which I speak with great
reluctance, and which I am now relating only after a session of
grilling persuasion from the publishers of this magazine, who had heard
vague rumours of it from other members of my family.
The hitherto guarded subject pertains to my non-professional visit to
Egypt fourteen years ago, and has been avoided by me for several
reasons. For one thing, I am averse to exploiting certain unmistakably
actual facts and conditions obviously unknown to the myriad tourists
who throng about the pyramids and apparently secreted with much
diligence by the authorities at Cairo, who cannot be wholly ignorant of
them. For another thing, I dislike to recount an incident in which my
own fantastic imagination must have played so great a part. What I
sawor thought I sawcertainly did not take place; but is rather to be
viewed as a result of my then recent readings in Egyptology, and of the
speculations anent this theme which my environment naturally prompted.
These imaginative stimuli, magnified by the excitement of an actual
event terrible enough in itself, undoubtedly gave rise to the
culminating horror of that grotesque night so long past.
In January, 1910, I had finished a professional engagement in England
and signed a contract for a tour of Australian theatres. A liberal time
being allowed for the trip, I determined to make the most of it in the
sort of travel which chiefly interests me; so accompanied by my wife I
drifted pleasantly down the Continent and embarked at Marseilles on the
P. & O. Steamer Malwa, bound for Port Said. From that point I proposed
to visit the principal historical localities of lower Egypt before
leaving finally for Australia.
The voyage was an agreeable one, and enlivened by many of the amusing
incidents which befall a magical performer apart from his work. I had
intended, for the sake of quiet travel, to keep my name a secret; but
was goaded into betraying myself by a fellow-magician whose anxiety to
astound the passengers with ordinary tricks tempted me to duplicate and
exceed his feats in a manner quite destructive of my incognito. I
mention this because of its ultimate effectan effect I should have
foreseen before unmasking to a shipload of tourists about to scatter
throughout the Nile Valley. What it did was to herald my identity
wherever I subsequently went, and deprive my wife and me of all the
placid inconspicuousness we had sought. Travelling to seek curiosities,
I was often forced to stand inspection as a sort of curiosity myself!
We had come to Egypt in search of the picturesque and the mystically
impressive, but found little enough when the ship edged up to Port Said
and discharged its passengers in small boats. Low dunes of sand,
bobbing buoys in shallow water, and a drearily European small town with
nothing of interest save the great De Lesseps statue, made us anxious
to get on to something more worth our while. After some discussion we
decided to proceed at once to Cairo and the Pyramids, later going to
Alexandria for the Australian boat and for whatever Graeco-Roman sights
that ancient metropolis might present.
The railway journey was tolerable enough, and consumed only four hours
and a half. We saw much of the Suez Canal, whose route we followed as
far as Ismailiya, and later had a taste of Old Egypt in our glimpse of
the restored fresh-water canal of the Middle Empire. Then at last we
saw Cairo glimmering through the growing dusk; a twinkling
constellation which became a blaze as we halted at the great Gare
Centrale.
But once more disappointment awaited us, for all that we beheld was
European save the costumes and the crowds. A prosaic subway led to a
square teeming with carriages, taxicabs, and trolley-cars, and gorgeous
with electric lights shining on tall buildings; whilst the very theatre
where I was vainly requested to play, and which I later attended as a
spectator, had recently been renamed the American Cosmograph. We
stopped at Shepherds Hotel, reached in a taxi that sped along broad,
smartly built-up streets; and amidst the perfect service of its
restaurant, elevators, and generally Anglo-American luxuries the
mysterious East and immemorial past seemed very far away.
The next day, however, precipitated us delightfully into the heart of
the Arabian Nights atmosphere; and in the winding ways and exotic
skyline of Cairo, the Bagdad of Haroun-al-Raschid seemed to live again.
Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens
along the Mouski in quest of the native quarter, and were soon in the
hands of a clamorous cicerone whonotwithstanding later
developmentswas assuredly a master at his trade. Not until afterward
did I see that I should have applied at the hotel for a licenced guide.
This man, a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced, and relatively cleanly
fellow who looked like a Pharaoh and called himself Abdul Reis el
Drogman, appeared to have much power over others of his kind; though
subsequently the police professed not to know him, and to suggest that
reis is merely a name for any person in authority, whilst Drogman is
obviously no more than a clumsy modification of the word for a leader
of tourist partiesdragoman.
Abdul led us among such wonders as we had before only read and dreamed
of. Old Cairo is itself a story-book and a dreamlabyrinths of narrow
alleys redolent of aromatic secrets; Arabesque balconies and oriels
nearly meeting above the cobbled streets; maelstroms of Oriental
traffic with strange cries, cracking whips, rattling carts, jingling
money, and braying donkeys; kaleidoscopes of polychrome robes, veils,
turbans, and tarbushes; water-carriers and dervishes, dogs and cats,
soothsayers and barbers; and over all the whining of blind beggars
crouched in alcoves, and the sonorous chanting of muezzins from
minarets limned delicately against a sky of deep, unchanging blue.
The roofed, quieter bazaars were hardly less alluring. Spice, perfume,
incense, beads, rugs, silks, and brassold Mahmoud Suleiman squats
cross-legged amidst his gummy bottles while chattering youths pulverise
mustard in the hollowed-out capital of an ancient classic columna
Roman Corinthian, perhaps from neighbouring Heliopolis, where Augustus
stationed one of his three Egyptian legions. Antiquity begins to mingle
with exoticism. And then the mosques and the museumwe saw them all,
and tried not to let our Arabian revel succumb to the darker charm of
Pharaonic Egypt which the museums priceless treasures offered. That
was to be our climax, and for the present we concentrated on the
mediaeval Saracenic glories of the Caliphs whose magnificent
tomb-mosques form a glittering faery necropolis on the edge of the
Arabian Desert.
At length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed Ali to the ancient
mosque of Sultan Hassan, and the tower-flanked Bab-el-Azab, beyond
which climbs the steep-walled pass to the mighty citadel that Saladin
himself built with the stones of forgotten pyramids. It was sunset when
we scaled that cliff, circled the modern mosque of Mohammed Ali, and
looked down from the dizzying parapet over mystic Cairomystic Cairo
all golden with its carven domes, its ethereal minarets, and its
flaming gardens. Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the
new museum; and beyond itacross the cryptic yellow Nile that is the
mother of aeons and dynastieslurked the menacing sands of the Libyan
Desert, undulant and iridescent and evil with older arcana. The red sun
sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it
stood poised on the worlds rim like that ancient god of
HeliopolisRe-Harakhte, the Horizon-Sunwe saw silhouetted against its
vermeil holocaust the black outlines of the Pyramids of Gizehthe
palaeogean tombs there were hoary with a thousand years when
Tut-Ankh-Amen mounted his golden throne in distant Thebes. Then we knew
that we were done with Saracen Cairo, and that we must taste the deeper
mysteries of primal Egyptthe black Khem of Re and Amen, Isis and
Osiris.
The next morning we visited the pyramids, riding out in a Victoria
across the great Nile bridge with its bronze lions, the island of
Ghizereh with its massive lebbakh trees, and the smaller English bridge
to the western shore. Down the shore road we drove, between great rows
of lebbakhs and past the vast Zological Gardens to the suburb of
Gizeh, where a new bridge to Cairo proper has since been built. Then,
turning inland along the Sharia-el-Haram, we crossed a region of glassy
canals and shabby native villages till before us loomed the objects of
our quest, cleaving the mists of dawn and forming inverted replicas in
the roadside pools. Forty centuries, as Napoleon had told his
campaigners there, indeed looked down upon us.
The road now rose abruptly, till we finally reached our place of
transfer between the trolley station and the Mena House Hotel. Abdul
Reis, who capably purchased our pyramid tickets, seemed to have an
understanding with the crowding, yelling, and offensive Bedouins who
inhabited a squalid mud village some distance away and pestiferously
assailed every traveller; for he kept them very decently at bay and
secured an excellent pair of camels for us, himself mounting a donkey
and assigning the leadership of our animals to a group of men and boys
more expensive than useful. The area to be traversed was so small that
camels were hardly needed, but we did not regret adding to our
experience this troublesome form of desert navigation.
The pyramids stand on a high rock plateau, this group forming next to
the northernmost of the series of regal and aristocratic cemeteries
built in the neighbourhood of the extinct capital Memphis, which lay on
the same side of the Nile, somewhat south of Gizeh, and which
flourished between 3400 and 2000 B. C. The greatest pyramid, which lies
nearest the modern road, was built by King Cheops or Khufu about 2800
B. C., and stands more than 450 feet in perpendicular height. In a line
southwest from this are successively the Second Pyramid, built a
generation later by King Khephren, and though slightly smaller, looking
even larger because set on higher ground, and the radically smaller
Third Pyramid of King Mycerinus, built about 2700 B. C. Near the edge
of the plateau and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably
altered to form a colossal portrait of Khephren, its royal restorer,
stands the monstrous Sphinxmute, sardonic, and wise beyond mankind and
memory.
Minor pyramids and the traces of ruined minor pyramids are found in
several places, and the whole plateau is pitted with the tombs of
dignitaries of less than royal rank. These latter were originally
marked by mastabas, or stone bench-like structures about the deep
burial shafts, as found in other Memphian cemeteries and exemplified by
Pernebs Tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. At Gizeh,
however, all such visible things have been swept away by time and
pillage; and only the rock-hewn shafts, either sand-filled or cleared
out by archaeologists, remain to attest their former existence.
Connected with each tomb was a chapel in which priests and relatives
offered food and prayer to the hovering ka or vital principle of the
deceased. The small tombs have their chapels contained in their stone
mastabas or superstructures, but the mortuary chapels of the pyramids,
where regal Pharaohs lay, were separate temples, each to the east of
its corresponding pyramid, and connected by a causeway to a massive
gate-chapel or propylon at the edge of the rock plateau.
The gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid, nearly buried in the
drifting sands, yawns subterraneously southeast of the Sphinx.
Persistent tradition dubs it the Temple of the Sphinx; and it may
perhaps be rightly called such if the Sphinx indeed represents the
Second Pyramids builder Khephren. There are unpleasant tales of the
Sphinx before Khephrenbut whatever its elder features were, the
monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus
without fear. It was in the great gateway-temple that the life-size
diorite statue of Khephren now in the Cairo Museum was found; a statue
before which I stood in awe when I beheld it. Whether the whole edifice
is now excavated I am not certain, but in 1910 most of it was below
ground, with the entrance heavily barred at night. Germans were in
charge of the work, and the war or other things may have stopped them.
I would give much, in view of my experience and of certain Bedouin
whisperings discredited or unknown in Cairo, to know what has developed
in connexion with a certain well in a transverse gallery where statues
of the Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of
baboons.
The road, as we traversed it on our camels that morning, curved sharply
past the wooden police quarters, post-office, drug-store, and shops on
the left, and plunged south and east in a complete bend that scaled the
rock plateau and brought us face to face with the desert under the lee
of the Great Pyramid. Past Cyclopean masonry we rode, rounding the
eastern face and looking down ahead into a valley of minor pyramids
beyond which the eternal Nile glistened to the east, and the eternal
desert shimmered to the west. Very close loomed the three major
pyramids, the greatest devoid of outer casing and shewing its bulk of
great stones, but the others retaining here and there the neatly fitted
covering which had made them smooth and finished in their day.
Presently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the
spell of those terrible unseeing eyes. On the vast stone breast we
faintly discerned the emblem of Re-Harakhte, for whose image the Sphinx
was mistaken in a late dynasty; and though sand covered the tablet
between the great paws, we recalled what Thutmosis IV inscribed
thereon, and the dream he had when a prince. It was then that the smile
of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the
legends of subterranean passages beneath the monstrous creature,
leading down, down, to depths none might dare hint atdepths connected
with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and having a
sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal-headed gods in
the ancient Nilotic pantheon. Then, too, it was I asked myself an idle
question whose hideous significance was not to appear for many an hour.
Other tourists now began to overtake us, and we moved on to the
sand-choked Temple of the Sphinx, fifty yards to the southeast, which I
have previously mentioned as the great gate of the causeway to the
Second Pyramids mortuary chapel on the plateau. Most of it was still
underground, and although we dismounted and descended through a modern
passageway to its alabaster corridor and pillared hall, I felt that
Abdul and the local German attendant had not shewn us all there was to
see. After this we made the conventional circuit of the pyramid
plateau, examining the Second Pyramid and the peculiar ruins of its
mortuary chapel to the east, the Third Pyramid and its miniature
southern satellites and ruined eastern chapel, the rock tombs and the
honeycombings of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, and the famous
Campells Tomb whose shadowy shaft sinks precipitously for 53 feet to a
sinister sarcophagus which one of our camel-drivers divested of the
cumbering sand after a vertiginous descent by rope.
Cries now assailed us from the Great Pyramid, where Bedouins were
besieging a party of tourists with offers of guidance to the top, or of
displays of speed in the performance of solitary trips up and down.
Seven minutes is said to be the record for such an ascent and descent,
but many lusty sheiks and sons of sheiks assured us they could cut it
to five if given the requisite impetus of liberal baksheesh. They did
not get this impetus, though we did let Abdul take us up, thus
obtaining a view of unprecedented magnificence which included not only
remote and glittering Cairo with its crowned citadel and background of
gold-violet hills, but all the pyramids of the Memphian district as
well, from Abu Roash on the north to the Dashur on the south. The
Sakkara step-pyramid, which marks the evolution of the low mastaba into
the true pyramid, shewed clearly and alluringly in the sandy distance.
It is close to this transition-monument that the famed Tomb of Perneb
was foundmore than 400 miles north of the Theban rock valley where
Tut-Ankh-Amen sleeps. Again I was forced to silence through sheer awe.
The prospect of such antiquity, and the secrets each hoary monument
seemed to hold and brood over, filled me with a reverence and sense of
immensity nothing else ever gave me.
Fatigued by our climb, and disgusted with the importunate Bedouins
whose actions seemed to defy every rule of taste, we omitted the
arduous detail of entering the cramped interior passages of any of the
pyramids, though we saw several of the hardiest tourists preparing for
the suffocating crawl through Cheops mightiest memorial. As we
dismissed and overpaid our local bodyguard and drove back to Cairo with
Abdul Reis under the afternoon sun, we half regretted the omission we
had made. Such fascinating things were whispered about lower pyramid
passages not in the guide-books; passages whose entrances had been
hastily blocked up and concealed by certain uncommunicative
archaeologists who had found and begun to explore them. Of course, this
whispering was largely baseless on the face of it; but it was curious
to reflect how persistently visitors were forbidden to enter the
pyramids at night, or to visit the lowest burrows and crypt of the
Great Pyramid. Perhaps in the latter case it was the psychological
effect which was fearedthe effect on the visitor of feeling himself
huddled down beneath a gigantic world of solid masonry; joined to the
life he has known by the merest tube, in which he may only crawl, and
which any accident or evil design might block. The whole subject seemed
so weird and alluring that we resolved to pay the pyramid plateau
another visit at the earliest possible opportunity. For me this
opportunity came much earlier than I expected.
That evening, the members of our party feeling somewhat tired after the
strenuous programme of the day, I went alone with Abdul Reis for a walk
through the picturesque Arab quarter. Though I had seen it by day, I
wished to study the alleys and bazaars in the dusk, when rich shadows
and mellow gleams of light would add to their glamour and fantastic
illusion. The native crowds were thinning, but were still very noisy
and numerous when we came upon a knot of revelling Bedouins in the
Suken-Nahhasin, or bazaar of the coppersmiths. Their apparent leader,
an insolent youth with heavy features and saucily cocked tarbush, took
some notice of us; and evidently recognised with no great friendliness
my competent but admittedly supercilious and sneeringly disposed guide.
Perhaps, I thought, he resented that odd reproduction of the Sphinxs
half-smile which I had often remarked with amused irritation; or
perhaps he did not like the hollow and sepulchral resonance of Abduls
voice. At any rate, the exchange of ancestrally opprobrious language
became very brisk; and before long Ali Ziz, as I heard the stranger
called when called by no worse name, began to pull violently at Abduls
robe, an action quickly reciprocated, and leading to a spirited scuffle
in which both combatants lost their sacredly cherished headgear and
would have reached an even direr condition had I not intervened and
separated them by main force.
My interference, at first seemingly unwelcome on both sides, succeeded
at last in effecting a truce. Sullenly each belligerent composed his
wrath and his attire; and with an assumption of dignity as profound as
it was sudden, the two formed a curious pact of honour which I soon
learned is a custom of great antiquity in Cairoa pact for the
settlement of their difference by means of a nocturnal fist fight atop
the Great Pyramid, long after the departure of the last moonlight
sightseer. Each duellist was to assemble a party of seconds, and the
affair was to begin at midnight, proceeding by rounds in the most
civilised possible fashion. In all this planning there was much which
excited my interest. The fight itself promised to be unique and
spectacular, while the thought of the scene on that hoary pile
overlooking the antediluvian plateau of Gizeh under the wan moon of the
pallid small hours appealed to every fibre of imagination in me. A
request found Abdul exceedingly willing to admit me to his party of
seconds; so that all the rest of the early evening I accompanied him to
various dens in the most lawless regions of the townmostly northeast
of the Ezbekiyehwhere he gathered one by one a select and formidable
band of congenial cutthroats as his pugilistic background.
Shortly after nine our party, mounted on donkeys bearing such royal or
tourist-reminiscent names as Rameses, Mark Twain, J. P. Morgan,
and Minnehaha, edged through street labyrinths both Oriental and
Occidental, crossed the muddy and mast-forested Nile by the bridge of
the bronze lions, and cantered philosophically between the lebbakhs on
the road to Gizeh. Slightly over two hours were consumed by the trip,
toward the end of which we passed the last of the returning tourists,
saluted the last in-bound trolley-car, and were alone with the night
and the past and the spectral moon.
Then we saw the vast pyramids at the end of the avenue, ghoulish with a
dim atavistical menace which I had not seemed to notice in the daytime.
Even the smallest of them held a hint of the ghastlyfor was it not in
this that they had buried Queen Nitokris alive in the Sixth Dynasty;
subtle Queen Nitokris, who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a
temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the water-gates? I
recalled that the Arabs whisper things about Nitokris, and shun the
Third Pyramid at certain phases of the moon. It must have been over her
that Thomas Moore was brooding when he wrote a thing muttered about by
Memphian boatmen
The subterranean nymph that dwells
Mid sunless gems and glories hid
The lady of the Pyramid!
Early as we were, Ali Ziz and his party were ahead of us; for we saw
their donkeys outlined against the desert plateau at Kafr-el-Haram;
toward which squalid Arab settlement, close to the Sphinx, we had
diverged instead of following the regular road to the Mena House, where
some of the sleepy, inefficient police might have observed and halted
us. Here, where filthy Bedouins stabled camels and donkeys in the rock
tombs of Khephrens courtiers, we were led up the rocks and over the
sand to the Great Pyramid, up whose time-worn sides the Arabs swarmed
eagerly, Abdul Reis offering me the assistance I did not need.
As most travellers know, the actual apex of this structure has long
been worn away, leaving a reasonably flat platform twelve yards square.
On this eerie pinnacle a squared circle was formed, and in a few
moments the sardonic desert moon leered down upon a battle which, but
for the quality of the ringside cries, might well have occurred at some
minor athletic club in America. As I watched it, I felt that some of
our less desirable institutions were not lacking; for every blow,
feint, and defence bespoke stalling to my not inexperienced eye. It
was quickly over, and despite my misgivings as to methods I felt a sort
of proprietary pride when Abdul Reis was adjudged the winner.
Reconciliation was phenomenally rapid, and amidst the singing,
fraternising, and drinking which followed, I found it difficult to
realise that a quarrel had ever occurred. Oddly enough, I myself seemed
to be more of a centre of notice than the antagonists; and from my
smattering of Arabic I judged that they were discussing my professional
performances and escapes from every sort of manacle and confinement, in
a manner which indicated not only a surprising knowledge of me, but a
distinct hostility and scepticism concerning my feats of escape. It
gradually dawned on me that the elder magic of Egypt did not depart
without leaving traces, and that fragments of a strange secret lore and
priestly cult-practices have survived surreptitiously amongst the
fellaheen to such an extent that the prowess of a strange hahwi or
magician is resented and disputed. I thought of how much my
hollow-voiced guide Abdul Reis looked like an old Egyptian priest or
Pharaoh or smiling Sphinx . . . and wondered.
Suddenly something happened which in a flash proved the correctness of
my reflections and made me curse the denseness whereby I had accepted
this nights events as other than the empty and malicious frameup
they now shewed themselves to be. Without warning, and doubtless in
answer to some subtle sign from Abdul, the entire band of Bedouins
precipitated itself upon me; and having produced heavy ropes, soon had
me bound as securely as I was ever bound in the course of my life,
either on the stage or off. I struggled at first, but soon saw that one
man could make no headway against a band of over twenty sinewy
barbarians. My hands were tied behind my back, my knees bent to their
fullest extent, and my wrists and ankles stoutly linked together with
unyielding cords. A stifling gag was forced into my mouth, and a
blindfold fastened tightly over my eyes. Then, as the Arabs bore me
aloft on their shoulders and began a jouncing descent of the pyramid, I
heard the taunts of my late guide Abdul, who mocked and jeered
delightedly in his hollow voice, and assured me that I was soon to have
my magic powers put to a supreme test which would quickly remove any
egotism I might have gained through triumphing over all the tests
offered by America and Europe. Egypt, he reminded me, is very old; and
full of inner mysteries and antique powers not even conceivable to the
experts of today, whose devices had so uniformly failed to entrap me.
How far or in what direction I was carried, I cannot tell; for the
circumstances were all against the formation of any accurate judgment.
I know, however, that it could not have been a great distance; since my
bearers at no point hastened beyond a walk, yet kept me aloft a
surprisingly short time. It is this perplexing brevity which makes me
feel almost like shuddering whenever I think of Gizeh and its
plateaufor one is oppressed by hints of the closeness to every-day
tourist routes of what existed then and must exist still.
The evil abnormality I speak of did not become manifest at first.
Setting me down on a surface which I recognised as sand rather than
rock, my captors passed a rope around my chest and dragged me a few
feet to a ragged opening in the ground, into which they presently
lowered me with much rough handling. For apparent aeons I bumped
against the stony irregular sides of a narrow hewn well which I took to
be one of the numerous burial shafts of the plateau until the
prodigious, almost incredible depth of it robbed me of all bases of
conjecture.
The horror of the experience deepened with every dragging second. That
any descent through the sheer solid rock could be so vast without
reaching the core of the planet itself, or that any rope made by man
could be so long as to dangle me in these unholy and seemingly
fathomless profundities of nether earth, were beliefs of such
grotesqueness that it was easier to doubt my agitated senses than to
accept them. Even now I am uncertain, for I know how deceitful the
sense of time becomes when one or more of the usual perceptions or
conditions of life is removed or distorted. But I am quite sure that I
preserved a logical consciousness that far; that at least I did not add
any full-grown phantoms of imagination to a picture hideous enough in
its reality, and explicable by a type of cerebral illusion vastly short
of actual hallucination.
All this was not the cause of my first bit of fainting. The shocking
ordeal was cumulative, and the beginning of the later terrors was a
very perceptible increase in my rate of descent. They were paying out
that infinitely long rope very swiftly now, and I scraped cruelly
against the rough and constricted sides of the shaft as I shot madly
downward. My clothing was in tatters, and I felt the trickle of blood
all over, even above the mounting and excruciating pain. My nostrils,
too, were assailed by a scarcely definable menace; a creeping odour of
damp and staleness curiously unlike anything I had ever smelt before,
and having faint overtones of spice and incense that lent an element of
mockery.
Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horriblehideous beyond all
articulate description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of
detail to describe. It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation
of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and daemoniacone
moment I was plunging agonisingly down that narrow well of
million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on bat-wings
in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swoopingly through illimitable
miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless
pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of
ravenous, nauseous lower vacua. . . . Thank God for the mercy that shut
out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness which half
unhinged my faculties, and tore Harpy-like at my spirit! That one
respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to endure
those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and
gibbered on the road ahead.
II.
It was very gradually that I regained my senses after that eldritch
flight through Stygian space. The process was infinitely painful, and
coloured by fantastic dreams in which my bound and gagged condition
found singular embodiment. The precise nature of these dreams was very
clear while I was experiencing them, but became blurred in my
recollection almost immediately afterward, and was soon reduced to the
merest outline by the terrible eventsreal or imaginarywhich followed.
I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a
yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to
crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was, it
seemed to me that it was Egypt. In the dream I looked back at the
events of the preceding weeks, and saw myself lured and enmeshed little
by little, subtly and insidiously, by some hellish ghoul-spirit of the
elder Nile sorcery; some spirit that was in Egypt before ever man was,
and that will be when man is no more.
I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly
alliance it has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead. I
saw phantom processions of priests with the heads of bulls, falcons,
cats, and ibises; phantom processions marching interminably through
subterraneous labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylaea beside which
a man is as a fly, and offering unnamable sacrifices to indescribable
gods. Stone colossi marched in endless night and drove herds of
grinning androsphinxes down to the shores of illimitable stagnant
rivers of pitch. And behind it all I saw the ineffable malignity of
primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after
me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by
emulation. In my sleeping brain there took shape a melodrama of
sinister hatred and pursuit, and I saw the black soul of Egypt singling
me out and calling me in inaudible whispers; calling and luring me,
leading me on with the glitter and glamour of a Saracenic surface, but
ever pulling me down to the age-mad catacombs and horrors of its dead
and abysmal pharaonic heart.
Then the dream-faces took on human resemblances, and I saw my guide
Abdul Reis in the robes of a king, with the sneer of the Sphinx on his
features. And I knew that those features were the features of Khephren
the Great, who raised the Second Pyramid, carved over the Sphinxs face
in the likeness of his own, and built that titanic gateway temple whose
myriad corridors the archaeologists think they have dug out of the
cryptical sand and the uninformative rock. And I looked at the long,
lean, rigid hand of Khephren; the long, lean, rigid hand as I had seen
it on the diorite statue in the Cairo Museumthe statue they had found
in the terrible gateway templeand wondered that I had not shrieked
when I saw it on Abdul Reis. . . . That hand! It was hideously cold,
and it was crushing me; it was the cold and cramping of the
sarcophagus . . . the chill and constriction of unrememberable
Egypt. . . . It was nighted, necropolitan Egypt itself . . . that
yellow paw . . . and they whisper such things of Khephren. . . .
But at this juncture I began to awakeor at least, to assume a
condition less completely that of sleep than the one just preceding. I
recalled the fight atop the pyramid, the treacherous Bedouins and their
attack, my frightful descent by rope through endless rock depths, and
my mad swinging and plunging in a chill void redolent of aromatic
putrescence. I perceived that I now lay on a damp rock floor, and that
my bonds were still biting into me with unloosened force. It was very
cold, and I seemed to detect a faint current of noisome air sweeping
across me. The cuts and bruises I had received from the jagged sides of
the rock shaft were paining me woefully, their soreness enhanced to a
stinging or burning acuteness by some pungent quality in the faint
draught, and the mere act of rolling over was enough to set my whole
frame throbbing with untold agony. As I turned I felt a tug from above,
and concluded that the rope whereby I was lowered still reached to the
surface. Whether or not the Arabs still held it, I had no idea; nor had
I any idea how far within the earth I was. I knew that the darkness
around me was wholly or nearly total, since no ray of moonlight
penetrated my blindfold; but I did not trust my senses enough to accept
as evidence of extreme depth the sensation of vast duration which had
characterised my descent.
Knowing at least that I was in a space of considerable extent reached
from the surface directly above by an opening in the rock, I doubtfully
conjectured that my prison was perhaps the buried gateway chapel of old
Khephrenthe Temple of the Sphinxperhaps some inner corridor which the
guides had not shewn me during my morning visit, and from which I might
easily escape if I could find my way to the barred entrance. It would
be a labyrinthine wandering, but no worse than others out of which I
had in the past found my way. The first step was to get free of my
bonds, gag, and blindfold; and this I knew would be no great task,
since subtler experts than these Arabs had tried every known species of
fetter upon me during my long and varied career as an exponent of
escape, yet had never succeeded in defeating my methods.
Then it occurred to me that the Arabs might be ready to meet and attack
me at the entrance upon any evidence of my probable escape from the
binding cords, as would be furnished by any decided agitation of the
rope which they probably held. This, of course, was taking for granted
that my place of confinement was indeed Khephrens Temple of the
Sphinx. The direct opening in the roof, wherever it might lurk, could
not be beyond easy reach of the ordinary modern entrance near the
Sphinx; if in truth it were any great distance at all on the surface,
since the total area known to visitors is not at all enormous. I had
not noticed any such opening during my daytime pilgrimage, but knew
that these things are easily overlooked amidst the drifting sands.
Thinking these matters over as I lay bent and bound on the rock floor,
I nearly forgot the horrors of the abysmal descent and cavernous
swinging which had so lately reduced me to a coma. My present thought
was only to outwit the Arabs, and I accordingly determined to work
myself free as quickly as possible, avoiding any tug on the descending
line which might betray an effective or even problematical attempt at
freedom.
This, however, was more easily determined than effected. A few
preliminary trials made it clear that little could be accomplished
without considerable motion; and it did not surprise me when, after one
especially energetic struggle, I began to feel the coils of falling
rope as they piled up about me and upon me. Obviously, I thought, the
Bedouins had felt my movements and released their end of the rope;
hastening no doubt to the temples true entrance to lie murderously in
wait for me. The prospect was not pleasingbut I had faced worse in my
time without flinching, and would not flinch now. At present I must
first of all free myself of bonds, then trust to ingenuity to escape
from the temple unharmed. It is curious how implicitly I had come to
believe myself in the old temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx, only a
short distance below the ground.
That belief was shattered, and every pristine apprehension of
preternatural depth and daemoniac mystery revived, by a circumstance
which grew in horror and significance even as I formulated my
philosophical plan. I have said that the falling rope was piling up
about and upon me. Now I saw that it was continuing to pile, as no rope
of normal length could possibly do. It gained in momentum and became an
avalanche of hemp, accumulating mountainously on the floor, and half
burying me beneath its swiftly multiplying coils. Soon I was completely
engulfed and gasping for breath as the increasing convolutions
submerged and stifled me. My senses tottered again, and I vainly tried
to fight off a menace desperate and ineluctable. It was not merely that
I was tortured beyond human endurancenot merely that life and breath
seemed to be crushed slowly out of meit was the knowledge of what
those unnatural lengths of rope implied, and the consciousness of what
unknown and incalculable gulfs of inner earth must at this moment be
surrounding me. My endless descent and swinging flight through goblin
space, then, must have been real; and even now I must be lying helpless
in some nameless cavern world toward the core of the planet. Such a
sudden confirmation of ultimate horror was insupportable, and a second
time I lapsed into merciful oblivion.
When I say oblivion, I do not imply that I was free from dreams. On the
contrary, my absence from the conscious world was marked by visions of
the most unutterable hideousness. God! . . . If only I had not read so
much Egyptology before coming to this land which is the fountain of all
darkness and terror! This second spell of fainting filled my sleeping
mind anew with shivering realisation of the country and its archaic
secrets, and through some damnable chance my dreams turned to the
ancient notions of the dead and their sojournings in soul and body
beyond those mysterious tombs which were more houses than graves. I
recalled, in dream-shapes which it is well that I do not remember, the
peculiar and elaborate construction of Egyptian sepulchres; and the
exceedingly singular and terrific doctrines which determined this
construction.
All these people thought of was death and the dead. They conceived of a
literal resurrection of the body which made them mummify it with
desperate care, and preserve all the vital organs in canopic jars near
the corpse; whilst besides the body they believed in two other
elements, the soul, which after its weighing and approval by Osiris
dwelt in the land of the blest, and the obscure and portentous ka or
life-principle which wandered about the upper and lower worlds in a
horrible way, demanding occasional access to the preserved body,
consuming the food offerings brought by priests and pious relatives to
the mortuary chapel, and sometimesas men whisperedtaking its body or
the wooden double always buried beside it and stalking noxiously abroad
on errands peculiarly repellent.
For thousands of years those bodies rested gorgeously encased and
staring glassily upward when not visited by the ka, awaiting the day
when Osiris should restore both ka and soul, and lead forth the stiff
legions of the dead from the sunken houses of sleep. It was to have
been a glorious rebirthbut not all souls were approved, nor were all
tombs inviolate, so that certain grotesque mistakes and fiendish
abnormalities were to be looked for. Even today the Arabs murmur of
unsanctified convocations and unwholesome worship in forgotten nether
abysses, which only winged invisible kas and soulless mummies may visit
and return unscathed.
Perhaps the most leeringly blood-congealing legends are those which
relate to certain perverse products of decadent priestcraftcomposite
mummies made by the artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the
heads of animals in imitation of the elder gods. At all stages of
history the sacred animals were mummified, so that consecrated bulls,
cats, ibises, crocodiles, and the like might return some day to greater
glory. But only in the decadence did they mix the human and animal in
the same mummyonly in the decadence, when they did not understand the
rights and prerogatives of the ka and the soul. What happened to those
composite mummies is not told ofat least publiclyand it is certain
that no Egyptologist ever found one. The whispers of Arabs are very
wild, and cannot be relied upon. They even hint that old Khephrenhe of
the Sphinx, the Second Pyramid, and the yawning gateway templelives
far underground wedded to the ghoul-queen Nitokris and ruling over the
mummies that are neither of man nor of beast.
It was of theseof Khephren and his consort and his strange armies of
the hybrid deadthat I dreamed, and that is why I am glad the exact
dream-shapes have faded from my memory. My most horrible vision was
connected with an idle question I had asked myself the day before when
looking at the great carven riddle of the desert and wondering with
what unknown depths the temple so close to it might be secretly
connected. That question, so innocent and whimsical then, assumed in my
dream a meaning of frenetic and hysterical madness . . . what huge and
loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?
My second awakeningif awakening it wasis a memory of stark
hideousness which nothing else in my lifesave one thing which came
aftercan parallel; and that life has been full and adventurous beyond
most mens. Remember that I had lost consciousness whilst buried
beneath a cascade of falling rope whose immensity revealed the
cataclysmic depth of my present position. Now, as perception returned,
I felt the entire weight gone; and realised upon rolling over that
although I was still tied, gagged, and blindfolded, some agency had
removed completely the suffocating hempen landslide which had
overwhelmed me. The significance of this condition, of course, came to
me only gradually; but even so I think it would have brought
unconsciousness again had I not by this time reached such a state of
emotional exhaustion that no new horror could make much difference. I
was alone . . . with what?
Before I could torture myself with any new reflection, or make any
fresh effort to escape from my bonds, an additional circumstance became
manifest. Pains not formerly felt were racking my arms and legs, and I
seemed coated with a profusion of dried blood beyond anything my former
cuts and abrasions could furnish. My chest, too, seemed pierced by an
hundred wounds, as though some malign, titanic ibis had been pecking at
it. Assuredly the agency which had removed the rope was a hostile one,
and had begun to wreak terrible injuries upon me when somehow impelled
to desist. Yet at the time my sensations were distinctly the reverse of
what one might expect. Instead of sinking into a bottomless pit of
despair, I was stirred to a new courage and action; for now I felt that
the evil forces were physical things which a fearless man might
encounter on an even basis.
On the strength of this thought I tugged again at my bonds, and used
all the art of a lifetime to free myself as I had so often done amidst
the glare of lights and the applause of vast crowds. The familiar
details of my escaping process commenced to engross me, and now that
the long rope was gone I half regained my belief that the supreme
horrors were hallucinations after all, and that there had never been
any terrible shaft, measureless abyss, or interminable rope. Was I
after all in the gateway temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx, and had
the sneaking Arabs stolen in to torture me as I lay helpless there? At
any rate, I must be free. Let me stand up unbound, ungagged, and with
eyes open to catch any glimmer of light which might come trickling from
any source, and I could actually delight in the combat against evil and
treacherous foes!
How long I took in shaking off my encumbrances I cannot tell. It must
have been longer than in my exhibition performances, because I was
wounded, exhausted, and enervated by the experiences I had passed
through. When I was finally free, and taking deep breaths of a chill,
damp, evilly spiced air all the more horrible when encountered without
the screen of gag and blindfold edges, I found that I was too cramped
and fatigued to move at once. There I lay, trying to stretch a frame
bent and mangled, for an indefinite period, and straining my eyes to
catch a glimpse of some ray of light which would give a hint as to my
position.
By degrees my strength and flexibility returned, but my eyes beheld
nothing. As I staggered to my feet I peered diligently in every
direction, yet met only an ebony blackness as great as that I had known
when blindfolded. I tried my legs, blood-encrusted beneath my shredded
trousers, and found that I could walk; yet could not decide in what
direction to go. Obviously I ought not to walk at random, and perhaps
retreat directly from the entrance I sought; so I paused to note the
direction of the cold, foetid, natron-scented air-current which I had
never ceased to feel. Accepting the point of its source as the possible
entrance to the abyss, I strove to keep track of this landmark and to
walk consistently toward it.
I had had a match box with me, and even a small electric flashlight;
but of course the pockets of my tossed and tattered clothing were long
since emptied of all heavy articles. As I walked cautiously in the
blackness, the draught grew stronger and more offensive, till at length
I could regard it as nothing less than a tangible stream of detestable
vapour pouring out of some aperture like the smoke of the genie from
the fishermans jar in the Eastern tale. The East . . . Egypt . . .
truly, this dark cradle of civilisation was ever the well-spring of
horrors and marvels unspeakable! The more I reflected on the nature of
this cavern wind, the greater my sense of disquiet became; for although
despite its odour I had sought its source as at least an indirect clue
to the outer world, I now saw plainly that this foul emanation could
have no admixture or connexion whatsoever with the clean air of the
Libyan Desert, but must be essentially a thing vomited from sinister
gulfs still lower down. I had, then, been walking in the wrong
direction!
After a moments reflection I decided not to retrace my steps. Away
from the draught I would have no landmarks, for the roughly level rock
floor was devoid of distinctive configurations. If, however, I followed
up the strange current, I would undoubtedly arrive at an aperture of
some sort, from whose gate I could perhaps work round the walls to the
opposite side of this Cyclopean and otherwise unnavigable hall. That I
might fail, I well realised. I saw that this was no part of Khephrens
gateway temple which tourists know, and it struck me that this
particular hall might be unknown even to archaeologists, and merely
stumbled upon by the inquisitive and malignant Arabs who had imprisoned
me. If so, was there any present gate of escape to the known parts or
to the outer air?
What evidence, indeed, did I now possess that this was the gateway
temple at all? For a moment all my wildest speculations rushed back
upon me, and I thought of that vivid mlange of impressionsdescent,
suspension in space, the rope, my wounds, and the dreams that were
frankly dreams. Was this the end of life for me? Or indeed, would it be
merciful if this moment were the end? I could answer none of my own
questions, but merely kept on till Fate for a third time reduced me to
oblivion. This time there were no dreams, for the suddenness of the
incident shocked me out of all thought either conscious or
subconscious. Tripping on an unexpected descending step at a point
where the offensive draught became strong enough to offer an actual
physical resistance, I was precipitated headlong down a black flight of
huge stone stairs into a gulf of hideousness unrelieved.
That I ever breathed again is a tribute to the inherent vitality of the
healthy human organism. Often I look back to that night and feel a
touch of actual humour in those repeated lapses of consciousness;
lapses whose succession reminded me at the time of nothing more than
the crude cinema melodramas of that period. Of course, it is possible
that the repeated lapses never occurred; and that all the features of
that underground nightmare were merely the dreams of one long coma
which began with the shock of my descent into that abyss and ended with
the healing balm of the outer air and of the rising sun which found me
stretched on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic and dawn-flushed
face of the Great Sphinx.
I prefer to believe this latter explanation as much as I can, hence was
glad when the police told me that the barrier to Khephrens gateway
temple had been found unfastened, and that a sizeable rift to the
surface did actually exist in one corner of the still buried part. I
was glad, too, when the doctors pronounced my wounds only those to be
expected from my seizure, blindfolding, lowering, struggling with
bonds, falling some distanceperhaps into a depression in the temples
inner gallerydragging myself to the outer barrier and escaping from
it, and experiences like that . . . a very soothing diagnosis. And yet
I know that there must be more than appears on the surface. That
extreme descent is too vivid a memory to be dismissedand it is odd
that no one has ever been able to find a man answering the description
of my guide Abdul Reis el Drogmanthe tomb-throated guide who looked
and smiled like King Khephren.
I have digressed from my connected narrativeperhaps in the vain hope
of evading the telling of that final incident; that incident which of
all is most certainly an hallucination. But I promised to relate it,
and do not break promises. When I recoveredor seemed to recovermy
senses after that fall down the black stone stairs, I was quite as
alone and in darkness as before. The windy stench, bad enough before,
was now fiendish; yet I had acquired enough familiarity by this time to
bear it stoically. Dazedly I began to crawl away from the place whence
the putrid wind came, and with my bleeding hands felt the colossal
blocks of a mighty pavement. Once my head struck against a hard object,
and when I felt of it I learned that it was the base of a columna
column of unbelievable immensitywhose surface was covered with
gigantic chiselled hieroglyphics very perceptible to my touch. Crawling
on, I encountered other titan columns at incomprehensible distances
apart; when suddenly my attention was captured by the realisation of
something which must have been impinging on my subconscious hearing
long before the conscious sense was aware of it.
From some still lower chasm in earths bowels were proceeding certain
sounds, measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard
before. That they were very ancient and distinctly ceremonial, I felt
almost intuitively; and much reading in Egyptology led me to associate
them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the tympanum. In
their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling, and beating I felt an element
of terror beyond all the known terrors of eartha terror peculiarly
dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of
objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths
such horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic cacophonies. The sounds
increased in volume, and I felt that they were approaching. Thenand
may all the gods of all pantheons unite to keep the like from my ears
againI began to hear, faintly and afar off, the morbid and millennial
tramping of the marching things.
It was hideous that footfalls so dissimilar should move in such perfect
rhythm. The training of unhallowed thousands of years must lie behind
that march of earths inmost monstrosities . . . padding, clicking,
walking, stalking, rumbling, lumbering, crawling . . . and all to the
abhorrent discords of those mocking instruments. And then . . . God
keep the memory of those Arab legends out of my head! The mummies
without souls . . . the meeting-place of the wandering kas . . . the
hordes of the devil-cursed pharaonic dead of forty centuries . . . the
composite mummies led through the uttermost onyx voids by King Khephren
and his ghoul-queen Nitokris. . . .
The tramping drew nearerheaven save me from the sound of those feet
and paws and hooves and pads and talons as it commenced to acquire
detail! Down limitless reaches of sunless pavement a spark of light
flickered in the malodorous wind, and I drew behind the enormous
circumference of a Cyclopic column that I might escape for a while the
horror that was stalking million-footed toward me through gigantic
hypostyles of inhuman dread and phobic antiquity. The flickers
increased, and the tramping and dissonant rhythm grew sickeningly loud.
In the quivering orange light there stood faintly forth a scene of such
stony awe that I gasped from a sheer wonder that conquered even fear
and repulsion. Bases of columns whose middles were higher than human
sight . . . mere bases of things that must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower
to insignificance . . . hieroglyphics carved by unthinkable hands in
caverns where daylight can be only a remote legend. . . .
I would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as
I heard their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music
and the dead tramping. It was merciful that they did not speak . . .
but God! their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of
those stupendous columns. Heaven take it away! Hippopotami should not
have human hands and carry torches . . . men should not have the heads
of crocodiles. . . .
I tried to turn away, but the shadows and the sounds and the stench
were everywhere. Then I remembered something I used to do in
half-conscious nightmares as a boy, and began to repeat to myself,
This is a dream! This is a dream! But it was of no use, and I could
only shut my eyes and pray . . . at least, that is what I think I did,
for one is never sure in visionsand I know this can have been nothing
more. I wondered whether I should ever reach the world again, and at
times would furtively open my eyes to see if I could discern any
feature of the place other than the wind of spiced putrefaction, the
topless columns, and the thaumatropically grotesque shadows of abnormal
horror. The sputtering glare of multiplying torches now shone, and
unless this hellish place were wholly without walls, I could not fail
to see some boundary or fixed landmark soon. But I had to shut my eyes
again when I realised how many of the things were assemblingand when I
glimpsed a certain object walking solemnly and steadily without any
body above the waist.
A fiendish and ululant corpse-gurgle or death-rattle now split the very
atmospherethe charnel atmosphere poisonous with naphtha and bitumen
blastsin one concerted chorus from the ghoulish legion of hybrid
blasphemies. My eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon
a sight which no human creature could even imagine without panic fear
and physical exhaustion. The things had filed ceremonially in one
direction, the direction of the noisome wind, where the light of their
torches shewed their bended heads . . . or the bended heads of such as
had heads. . . . They were worshipping before a great black
foetor-belching aperture which reached up almost out of sight, and
which I could see was flanked at right angles by two giant staircases
whose ends were far away in shadow. One of these was indubitably the
staircase I had fallen down.
The dimensions of the hole were fully in proportion with those of the
columnsan ordinary house would have been lost in it, and any average
public building could easily have been moved in and out. It was so vast
a surface that only by moving the eye could one trace its
boundaries . . . so vast, so hideously black, and so aromatically
stinking. . . . Directly in front of this yawning Polyphemus-door the
things were throwing objectsevidently sacrifices or religious
offerings, to judge by their gestures. Khephren was their leader;
sneering King Khephren or the guide Abdul Reis, crowned with a golden
pshent and intoning endless formulae with the hollow voice of the dead.
By his side knelt beautiful Queen Nitokris, whom I saw in profile for a
moment, noting that the right half of her face was eaten away by rats
or other ghouls. And I shut my eyes again when I saw what objects were
being thrown as offerings to the foetid aperture or its possible local
deity.
It occurred to me that judging from the elaborateness of this worship,
the concealed deity must be one of considerable importance. Was it
Osiris or Isis, Horus or Anubis, or some vast unknown God of the Dead
still more central and supreme? There is a legend that terrible altars
and colossi were reared to an Unknown One before ever the known gods
were worshipped. . . .
And now, as I steeled myself to watch the rapt and sepulchral
adorations of those nameless things, a thought of escape flashed upon
me. The hall was dim, and the columns heavy with shadow. With every
creature of that nightmare throng absorbed in shocking raptures, it
might be barely possible for me to creep past to the faraway end of one
of the staircases and ascend unseen; trusting to Fate and skill to
deliver me from the upper reaches. Where I was, I neither knew nor
seriously reflected uponand for a moment it struck me as amusing to
plan a serious escape from that which I knew to be a dream. Was I in
some hidden and unsuspected lower realm of Khephrens gateway
templethat temple which generations have persistently called the
Temple of the Sphinx? I could not conjecture, but I resolved to ascend
to life and consciousness if wit and muscle could carry me.
Wriggling flat on my stomach, I began the anxious journey toward the
foot of the left-hand staircase, which seemed the more accessible of
the two. I cannot describe the incidents and sensations of that crawl,
but they may be guessed when one reflects on what I had to watch
steadily in that malign, wind-blown torchlight in order to avoid
detection. The bottom of the staircase was, as I have said, far away in
shadow; as it had to be to rise without a bend to the dizzy parapeted
landing above the titanic aperture. This placed the last stages of my
crawl at some distance from the noisome herd, though the spectacle
chilled me even when quite remote at my right.
At length I succeeded in reaching the steps and began to climb; keeping
close to the wall, on which I observed decorations of the most hideous
sort, and relying for safety on the absorbed, ecstatic interest with
which the monstrosities watched the foul-breezed aperture and the
impious objects of nourishment they had flung on the pavement before
it. Though the staircase was huge and steep, fashioned of vast porphyry
blocks as if for the feet of a giant, the ascent seemed virtually
interminable. Dread of discovery and the pain which renewed exercise
had brought to my wounds combined to make that upward crawl a thing of
agonising memory. I had intended, on reaching the landing, to climb
immediately onward along whatever upper staircase might mount from
there; stopping for no last look at the carrion abominations that pawed
and genuflected some seventy or eighty feet belowyet a sudden
repetition of that thunderous corpse-gurgle and death-rattle chorus,
coming as I had nearly gained the top of the flight and shewing by its
ceremonial rhythm that it was not an alarm of my discovery, caused me
to pause and peer cautiously over the parapet.
The monstrosities were hailing something which had poked itself out of
the nauseous aperture to seize the hellish fare proffered it. It was
something quite ponderous, even as seen from my height; something
yellowish and hairy, and endowed with a sort of nervous motion. It was
as large, perhaps, as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very curiously
shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five separate shaggy heads
springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk; the first very
small, the second good-sized, the third and fourth equal and largest of
all, and the fifth rather small, though not so small as the first. Out
of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously
on the excessively great quantities of unmentionable food placed before
the aperture. Once in a while the thing would leap up, and occasionally
it would retreat into its den in a very odd manner. Its locomotion was
so inexplicable that I stared in fascination, wishing it would emerge
further from the cavernous lair beneath me.
Then it did emerge . . . it did emerge, and at the sight I turned and
fled into the darkness up the higher staircase that rose behind me;
fled unknowingly up incredible steps and ladders and inclined planes to
which no human sight or logic guided me, and which I must ever relegate
to the world of dreams for want of any confirmation. It must have been
dream, or the dawn would never have found me breathing on the sands of
Gizeh before the sardonic dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.
The Great Sphinx! God!that idle question I asked myself on that
sun-blest morning before . . . what huge and loathsome abnormality was
the Sphinx originally carven to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it
in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horrorthe Unknown God
of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss,
fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The
five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as
large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monsterand that of which
it is the merest fore paw. . . .
But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.
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