X. THE ELDER AGE
This lore was old before the rise of Ur,
Before the pomp of Babylon was born,
Ere golden Egypt knew her golden morn.
Or Tyre, or Nineveh, or dark Sumer.
Ere any human peoples trod the earth
The blue Pacific lapped the carven walls
Of seacoast cities whose basaltic halls
Were drowned in myth before Atlantis' birth.
Lost land, thy ancient mages read the stars
And scanned necrotic hieroglyphs on scrolls
Borne hence from flighted Yuggoth where she rolls
Far on the Rim amidst fantastic wars.
Only the Text bears witness to thy lore,
Sunken R'lyeh, that shall rise no more.
XI. LOST R'LYEH
Long-lost and legended, R'lyeh sleeps,
Dreaming ensorcelled ages by, the while
Slow foetid waves wash round her rotting pile
Drowned in the utter most of ocean deeps ...
Until the stars are right, when from that tomb
The awful Dead her primal ruins hide
Shall rise tremendous, as was prophesied.
Until that hour she sleeping bides her doom,
Wake not, dread ruin that the tides caress.
Thou weed-grown mass of thronged decaying spires.
Dim, phosphor-litten with putrescent fires—
Sleep on, thou whelmed, accurst necropolis!
Too soon shall from thy cyclopean fane
Cthulhu wake to walk the earth again!
XII. UNKNOWN KADATH
In what remote Hyperborean clime,
Under what alien-configured skies
Namelessly constellated, it doth rise
Is known to none. In the abyss of time
No eye hath seen the sable mountain rear
Her pinnacles. The place hath not been guessed
Where Kadath lifts her onyx-castled crest
Among the shantak-guarded deserts drear.
Only chose dreamers roaming far afield
Beyond the lands we know, to them alone
Is far and fabulous Kadath revealed
And all her mysteries to them made known,
And That which lies deep in her inmost crypt—
The secret of the Pnakotic Manuscript.
(page missing)
XV. THE BOOK OF EIBON
In glacier-whelmed and lost Commoriom,
Aeons before Atlantis, at the Pole
Where now but black and frozen oceans roll
Their sluggish tides, and warm suns never come,
He sought the secrets of the Elder Age,
Of nightmare gods and old fantastic wars
Brought down by Tsathoggua from the stars
And chronicled on Eibon's darkling page.
Hyperborea spake his name with dread
And whispered of strange shapes and stranger light
That moved about his ebon spire one night
When thunder spoke and all the stars burned red.
Next morn it lay in ruins everywhere.
They found his Book. His body was not there ....
XVI. TSATHOGGUA
Beneath Voormithadreth the Mount of Dread
In lost Hyperborea long ago
Before the coming of eternal snow.
The wizard followed where the shantak led;
Down through the gulfs of those tremendous deeps,
Caverns of nightmare, where the wholesome sun
Hath never shone since first the earth begun,
To that abyss where Tsathoggua sleeps.
Eibon alone hath seen, and come back sane
From that slime pit of madness where It lies,
The Black Abomination from the skies,
Who sleepeth now but who shall wake again.
We know the truth, we who have dared to look
Into the darkling pages of his Book ....
XVII BLACK ZIMBABWE
In dreams alone I tread those jungled streets
Where shattered columns, black with hoary age.
Hint of the splendour of some crumbling page
Of history now legended. The seats
Of prehistoric majesty still stand—
The monstrous walls, the cryptic minarets
—But whose the hand that raised them? Time forgets,
Mazed in the darkness of this silent land.
Only the moon remembers, ages gone,
The glittering, barbaric Wizard-Kings
Who found the Sign and made the Offerings
In the forgotten ages of earth's dawn.
The moon alone recalls that nameless crime
That wiped them from the memory of Time.
XVIII. THE RETURN
Something is wrong tonight. Far out to sea
Strange phosphorescence flickers from below.
The ocean heaves in waves uneasy, slow,
That roil and bubble, an old prophecy
Comes back to haunt my soul ... the stars burn cold,
In patterns oddly wrong. And now the deep
Surges, like something—stirring—in its sleep!
Is this the Night the ancient books foretold?
Iä! The seas unfold! That Shape—’tis true!
He rises from the city old as time! ...
I woke ... and knew it but a dream ... yet knew
The blood-congealing truth of that old rhyme:
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die."
XIX. THE SABBAT
"This is the night," the sly-faced stranger leered
—He had approached me on the lonely streets—
"This is the night the Arkham coven meets!"
Before I answered he had disappeared.
At nightfall I went down the cellar steps
And through that secret door which I had found.
It led by dark ways tunneled underground
Into a caverned abyss in the depths.
Weak with a mingled loathing and desire,
I joined the hooded throng that milled and whirled
About the standing stones, red-lit with fire
That flamed up from the bowels of the world.
One hailed me—"Azath!"—he was robed in red—
''That was your Uncle's coven-name," he said.
XX. BLACK LOTUS
The Coven-Master gave to me a phial
Of that dread opiate that is the key
To dream-gates opening upon a sea
Of achetontic vapours: mile on mile
Stretched ebon coasts untrod, wherefrom aspire
Pylons of rough-hewn stone climbing to skies
Alien-constellated, where arise
Grey mottled moons of cold and leprous fire.
My dream-self roamed the cosmic gulfs profound.
Past daemon-haunted Haddith, where in deeps
Of foul putrescence buried underground
The loathsome shoggoth hideously sleeps.
I saw—and screamed! And knew my doom of dooms,
Learning at last ... where the Black Lotus blooms.