I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by
tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug
which alone, makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall
cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think
from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have
read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why
it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.
It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of
the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the
German sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean
forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that
our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with
all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed,
was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed
to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of
time.
When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little
idea of my surroundings. Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely
by the sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude
I knew nothing, and no island or coastline was in sight. The weather kept fair,
and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting
either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable
land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude
upon the heaving vastness of unbroken blue.
The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never
know; for my slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When
at last I awakened, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse
of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far
as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.
Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be
of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in
reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the
rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region
was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable
things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps
I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can
dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing,
and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness
of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a
nauseating fear.
The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost
black in its cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my
feet. As I crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory could
explain my position. Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of
the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for
innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths.
So great was the extent of the new land which had risen
beneath me, that I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean,
strain my ears as I might.
Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.
For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat,
which lay upon its side and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the
heavens. As the day progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and
seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That
night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself a pack containing
food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea
and possible rescue.
On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon
with ease. The odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned
with graver things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown
goal. All day I forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away hummock which
rose higher than any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I
encamped, and on the following day still travelled toward the hummock, though
that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the
fourth evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much
higher than it had appeared from a distance, an intervening valley setting it
out in sharper relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in
the shadow of the hill.
I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the
waning and fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I
was awake in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I
had experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the
moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the
parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt
quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my
pack, I started for the crest of the eminence.
I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain
was a source of vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I
gained the summit of the mound and looked down the other side into an
immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared
high enough to illumine. I felt myself on the edge of the world, peering over
the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious
reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and Satan's hideous climb through the
unfashioned realms of darkness.
As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the
slopes of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges
and outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy footholds for a descent, whilst
after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual. Urged on
by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty
down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian
deeps where no light had yet penetrated.
All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular
object on the opposite slope, which rose steeply about a hundred yards ahead of
me; an object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending
moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I
was conscious of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not
altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I
cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss
which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived
beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive
bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking
creatures.
Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the
scientist's or archaeologist's delight, I examined my surroundings more closely.
The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering
steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of
water flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost
lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed
the base of the
Cyclopean monolith, on whose surface I could now trace both
inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics
unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books, consisting for the
most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi,
crustaceans, molluscs, whales and the like. Several characters obviously
represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose
decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain.
It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold
me spellbound.
Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of
their enormous size was an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have
excited the envy of a Dore. I think that these things were supposed to depict
men -- at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shown
disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at
some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their
faces and forms I dare not speak in detail, for the mere remembrance makes me
grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were
damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide
and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to
recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of
proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shown in
the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I
remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment
decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or
seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the
first ancestor of the
Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this
unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring
anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the
silent channel before me. Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to
mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters.
Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of
nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the
while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I
think I went mad then.
Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my
delirious journey back to the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang
a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct
recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate,
I knew that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in
her wildest moods.
When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco
hospital; brought thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked
up my boat in mid-ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words
had been given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers
knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew
they could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused
him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon,
the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not
press my inquiries.
It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning,
that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient
surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to
end it all, having written a full account for the information or the
contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all
have been a pure phantasm -- a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and
raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask
myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I
cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may
at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping
their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on
submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise
above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny,
war-exhausted mankind -- of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean
floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some
immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand!
The window! The window!
Written Jul 1917
Published November 1919 in The Vagrant, No.
11, 23-29.
BACKGROUND
............
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author of fantasy, horror and science fiction. Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, he has become a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the Cthulhu Mythos as well as the famed Necronomicon.
