LITMIR.BIZ

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of art belonging to civilisation’s youth – or indeed to any other time. Even its material was a mystery. The soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations was not familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were totally unknown. Nobody had the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it.

      The members shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem. Yet there was one man in that gathering who recognized bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing. This person was the late William Channing Webb[30], Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and a famous explorer.

      Professor Webb took part, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions. On the West Greenland coast he met a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux[31]. Their religion was a curious form of devil-worship. It frightened him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness[32] and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little. They mentioned it only with shudders. They said that it came down from horribly ancient ages before the creation of the world. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals. These rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil ortornasuk[33]. Professor Webb took a careful phonetic copy of this from an agedangekok or wizard-priest[34]. It was expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. The most important thing was the fetish, around which they danced when the aurora leaped high[35] over the ice cliffs. The professor stated that it was a very crude bas-relief of stone. It was comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing which was now lying before the meeting.

      The assembled members received information with suspense and astonishment. It was even more exciting to Inspector Legrasse. He began at once to question his informant. He noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers which his men arrested. So he asked the professor to remember the syllables from the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details and a moment of silence. Both detective and scientist agreed on the identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals. Both the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests chanted to their kindred idols strange words. They were something like this:

      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

      Legrasse said that some his mongrel prisoners told him the meaning of these words. This text meant:

      “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming[36].”

      And now Inspector Legrasse related his experience with the swamp worshippers. This is the story to which my uncle attached profound significance. It was the wildest dream of a myth-maker or a theosophist.

      On November 1st, 1907, some frantic summons came to the New Orleans police from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The people there are mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men[37]. They were in stark terror from an unknown thing which occurred in the night.

      It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of the most terrible sort. Since the malevolent tom-tom[38] began its incessant beating, some of their women and children disappeared. The sounds came from the black haunted woods where no one walked. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames. The frightened messenger added that it was impossible to stand that.

      So twenty police officers in two carriages and an automobile went there. The shivering squatter was their guide. At the end of the road they walked for miles in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them. Finally, they saw the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts. Hysterical dwellers ran out to meet them. The policemen heard the beat of tom-toms now. It was far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came when the wind shifted. The dim red light was visible through the forrest. The squatters refused to go toward the scene of unholy worship. Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues went into black arcades of horror.

      They entered that region of traditionally evil repute. White men normally did not enter it. There were legends of a hidden lake, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous animal with luminous eyes. Squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. It was there before the Indians, and before even the beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it was coming to people in dreams, and so they knew enough not to go there. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the fringe of this area. But even that location was bad enough. Perhaps the very place of the worship terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.

      Legrasse’s men went on through the black swamp toward the red glare and muffled tom-toms. There are sounds made by men, and sounds made by beasts and was terrible their dreadful combination. The policemen heard howls of animal fury and orgiastic ecstasy. The voices were like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. From time to time the sounds ceased and a chorus of hoarse voices chanted that hideous phrase or ritual:

      “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

      Then the men reached a spot where the trees were thinner. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two cried frantically. Legrasse splashed some water in the face of the fainted man. They stood there, trembling and nearly hypnotized with horror.

      In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island. The island was of an acre’s extent, clear of trees and dry. On this now leaped and twisted indescribable horde of humans. They were totally naked. This hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire. In the centre stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height. On top of this great granite monolith rested the noxious carven statuette. Ten scaffolds were set up at regular intervals, forming a circle. From them hung, head downward, the marred bodies of the helpless disappeared squatters. Inside this circle the ring of worshippers jumped and roared. They were moving from left to right in endless dance between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

      It may be only imagination, but one of policemen, a Spanish man, heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot within the wood. I later met and questioned this man, Joseph D. Galvez. He said that he heard beating of great wings. He saw a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees. I suppose he was a little superstitious.

      But duty came first. The police relied on their firearms and went determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the chaos was beyond description. Blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made. In the end Legrasse counted forty-seven sullen prisoners. He ordered to dress them and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two were severely wounded. Of course, Legrasse took the statuette from the monolith.

      After an exhausting trip, the prisoners were examined. They were men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type[39]. Most were seamen, some Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands[40]. This cult and its members looked like connected to voodooism. But before many questions, it became clear that something far deeper and older than Negro fetishism was involved.

      They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones[41] who lived ages before there were any men. The Great Old Ones came to the young world out of the sky.

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