The next day proved to be more productive, though in ways which we could not yet understand. The morning found me again in Coler’s library recommencing my examination of the Alhazred volume, while Coler himself continued to tackle the Warangal tome. Some time afterwards, perhaps an hour before noon, I, resting my eyes from the crabbed and blurred writing, looked at that morning’s paper, which was lying haphazardly on the floor next to me. In it was an article which, though small and of apparent inconsequence, proved later to be vastly significant. The article was this:
OCCULTISTS HOLD CLANDESTINE MEETING
Brichester: 2 July 1940. A band of some two dozen occult worshippers, ranging in age from eighteen to over seventy, were seen performing some dark ritual on the top of Sentinel Hill outside Brichester yesterday night, where there are located some primitive Druid megaliths. No sacrifices seem to have been made, but the leader of the flock, an old man of about sixty, who seemed to serve the function of a priest, was heard intoning weird chants which the “congregation” echoed. The whole incident seemed to be of little importance, for the ritual or ceremony lasted scarcely half an hour. This was the first of such meetings in over six months, and officials are fearing a recurrence of the disappearance of various young children which occurred the last time the gathering met, in late December 1939.
It cannot be said that, when I first read the article, I paid any great attention to it. In the quest for ascertaining the origin and function of Coler’s crystal, I was hardly about to give much notice to some absurd litany performed by a handful of degenerate, semi-crazed individuals. I remember remarking to myself that the Brichester Herald must truly be desperate for news, if it were lowered to including such trite and ludicrous affairs in its pages.
My subsequent finishing of the Necronomicon two hours later coincided almost exactly with Coler’s completion of the huge Warangal tome; the result, of course, was as before: although both the Necronomicon and Civitates Antiquae Fantasticae contained detailed accounts of Irem, the City of Pillars, there was nothing in either volume which we could relate to the excavated crystal. Our minds were already weary with reading, and Coler’s suggestion that we take some lunch was heartily accepted by me.
The phone call came immediately after we had finished. Coler was informed by the operator, when picking up the instrument, that he was receiving a call from Wolverhampton Airport from a man who was a resident, of all places, of Arkham, Massachusetts! Wilmarth, who had probably forgotten Coler’s very name, surely could have nothing to do with us, and the reputation for eccentricity and, it must be admitted, rank enmity of his colleagues which was Coler’s further created a mystery as to the identity of our transatlantic caller. The enigma was solved, however, immediately upon the utterance of the American’s first words.
“Meredith!” Coler jovially exclaimed in reply. “It’s been nearly fifteen years since I’ve heard your voice! Why in the world are you in Tewkesbury?… To see me? For what reason?… I understand… As a matter of fact, I am, but it has been so discouraging that I’d be glad to give it up and tackle something fresh… We will be there shortly. Good day.”
Upon Coler’s hanging up the phone, he related to me the gist of the conversation. It seemed that Joseph Meredith, now head of the Archaeology Department at Miskatonic, and one of Coler’s few friends, had come here to give Coler an ancient and curious hieroglyphic tract which a Miskatonic expedition to Egypt had recently discovered. Meredith’s staff, unable to decipher the evidently millennia-old fragment, had decided to put the thing in Coler’s hands, knowing that he was one of the world’s foremost authorities on elder tongues. The archaeologist had just arrived here, at Wolverhampton Airport in Tewkesbury, and had asked that Coler come and fetch him and bring him back here so that work might be begun on the text; to which request Coler had agreed.
When we arrived at the airport, we saw Meredith with, not only suitcases, but another small black container which we knew was a special housing case for old parchments, a case which would protect the manuscript from the decimating effects of time and the elements. As we entered the car and drove back to Coler’s manor, Meredith explained more about the find.
The trip to various ruins in Egypt had been made only that winter, and, aside from other minor archaeological artifacts, this parchment had been the only significant product. Its being unearthed in a ruin near the town of Kurkur had given it the name of the Kurkur Fragment. Linguists, archaeologists, and antiquarians alike had been baffled as to the language or dialect of its writing; that it was either a modern or archaic dialect of Egyptian had been almost at once ruled out, and, as it might easily have been transported to Egypt from as far a place as India, tests had been made as to whether the document was in either Arabic, Sanscrit, or the dozen modern and obsolete Indian dialects; but the results had all been equally negative, serving only to confirm that it was either penned in a language of unbelievable obscurity, or that it was inexplicably written in code. Meredith himself, remembering Lang’s Voynich Manuscript, had put forth the theory that the work might be in a sort of hybrid language, i.e. Sanscrit letters (for this much was obvious from the text) perhaps forming Hittite or Assyrian words. The work on this hypothesis had only begun, for there seemed to be, considering the unknown origin, almost no end of permutations that could be had. Meredith had then thought of letting Coler scrutinize the tract so that the possibility of its being in some abstruse tongue, known only to Coler and other such specialists, might be explored. This was, then, the reason for Meredith’s arrival.
Coler would not stand for Meredith’s lodging in a hotel, and offered his own mansion—a multi-roomed stone edifice whose construction might have dated from the sixteenth century, and only a fraction of which was used—as a temporary residence and base of operations. The afternoon was progressing by the time we had returned to Severnford, and Coler’s suggestion of an early dinner which would leave the entire evening free for studying the manuscript was accepted by both Meredith and myself.
That evening, however, was important not so much for our working on the Kurkur Fragment as for an incident which made us realize, perhaps for the first time, that we were involved in matters whose scope was far greater than we had originally supposed.
Putting forth the thoroughly justifiable plea of fatigue from his 4,000-mile trip, Meredith retired early that night. We did not fail, however, first to show him Coler’s anomalous crystal; indeed, it was Meredith himself who had requested to see it, having heard of the find from one of Coler’s party, a Miskatonic graduate student named Craig Phillips. Coler told his colleague all the facts about its discovery, its sudden commencing to glow, and our own inefficacious efforts at trying to enucleate its origin and use. Coler, too, explained that the glowing had definitely grown larger since the morning, the phosphorescent ball inside now approaching a diameter of two and a half inches. Meredith, not unnaturally involved in his own arcanum, seemed to pay Coler only enough attention as might just be within the bounds of courtesy, and then tried to steer Coler’s mind back to the new mystery which he had dropped in his lap. This was not a difficult task to perform, considering our double irritation at the total absence of any clues as to the crystal’s function and significance.