In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams,
but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres,
had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which
not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and
high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of
the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up
in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut
himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction.
The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said
that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of
Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was
virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless
Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
| “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.” Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye. |
