Out of the Aeons
By H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald
I.
(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—partly
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.
