Dénis de Rougement (Love in the Western World) explains what’s going on here, though I am extending and adapting his point somewhat. Faustian seekers in horror tales do not merely blunder into their fates. They are seeking an imagined "realer reality" higher than this mundane world. This is what Arthur Machen’s character Ambrose (in “The White People”) calls “real sin”, the storming of heaven. What is the sharper, brighter, realer world "beyond this illusion" (Kansas, “Carry On My Wayward Son”, 1975)? It is death. That is also the crucial key to the attraction of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, I suspect. File shadowy existence of the vampire, life lived on the edge, at the extreme, ironically makes the waking world of the living seem like dusty death by contrast. The chic of the vampire is, like traditional religious faith in an afterlife, a wishful denial of Epicurus’ truth: “When death comes, we are not.” Both afterlife belief and vampire fiction posit that when we are dead we will be aware of it, and that in this way death will be the elevation of life. Life was the tedious rehearsal; death is the real thing.
Even so, Professor Mayhew (like so many others) seeks a truth that, once known, must necessarily translate him from this dull sphere into the rarefied atmosphere of what lies outside, and that is death. Ironically, it is he, not the giant vultures, who is the “fisher.” He is casting his line out into the void, hoping to find the greater existence that overcomes the world: death. He might not know to put it into those words, bur his actions speak louder than words. Like Richard Pickman, horror delvers such as Professor Mayhew finally slip back into that darkness they loved to haunt, because for them, like the avatar in "The Haunter of the Dark", darkness is as radiant light.
In the original version of this story, Lin had confused Golgoroth, the amorphous god of darkness, and Groth-Golka. the bird-god, both of whom appear in Robert E. Howard's “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth.” He had intended to make the change to Groth-Golka, but did not get to it. In this publication of the story I have made the correction.
The Fishers from Outside
by Lin Carter
WHEN Mayhew found the Black Stone beneath the ruins of Zimbabwe, it was the culmination of many long and weary years of work. His quest had begun twenty years before, when as a young student at Miskatonic he had first heard of the "Fishers from Outside" in the unpublished journals of the explorer Slauenwite. That odd and curious term was the name by which the Gallas of Uganda referred to a mysterious race that had ruled central Uganda—according to the legend—before the first mammals were.
Intrigued, Mayhew read on with growing excitement as Slauenwite told of certain hellishly old stone ruins which the local tribes dread and avoid, of jungle-grown megaliths believed to be "older than man", and of a certain stone city somewhere in the south which their witch doctors whispered was an abandoned outpost of creatures "flown down from the stars when the world was young."
I suppose it is hard for a scholar or a scientist to pin down exactly what first impelled him in the direction of his future work. But Mayhew always said it was the native stories Slauenwite recorded in 1932 in his journals. At any rate, he embarked on a search for more information about the Fishers from Outside. He found fragments of lore concerning the mystery race in such old books as the dubious Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the notorious Book of Eibon, Dostmann's questionable Remnants of Lost Empires, De Vermis Mysteriis by the Flemish wizard Ludvig Prinn, and the frightful Ponape Scripture that Abner Exekiel Hoag had found in the Pacific islands. In the fervor of his growing obsession, Mayhew even dared to look into the nightmarish pages of the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the Arabian demonologist.
According to Alhazred's account, the Fishers were the minions or servants of the demon Groth-golka, who had anciently been worshiped on Bal-Sagoth, which some rather questionable authorities claim to have been the last foundering remnant of the mythical Atlantis. On Bal-Sagoth he was worshiped in his "bird-god” avatar, wrote the Arab. Most scholars would dismiss the legend as idle tales, but Mayhew knew there was independent corroboration for at least part of the account, for Norse voyagers during the early Crusades had seen Bal-Sagoth, recording something of its strange gods in their sagas.
AFTER completing his doctorate, Mayhew obtained a grant and went to Africa He followed the footsteps of Slauenwite, exploring central Uganda, studying native myths and stories. Tales came to his ears of an ancient stone city buried in the southern jungles of the Dark Continent, which some thought the ruins of the legendary King Solomon’s mines but which others ascribed to the handiwork of Portuguese slavers or traders. Mayhew knew that the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy had written many centuries ago of "Agysimba", the stone city in the jungle. Doubtless the Ugandan myth and the old Egyptian story referred to the same ruin ... and that could hardly be anything else than old Zimbabwe itself, that immemorial and mysterious stone city deep in the jungled heart of Rhodesia ... Zimbabwe, whereof so much is whispered and so very little known for certain.
I joined him at the site of Zimbabwe in 1946. I had been studying at the University of Cape Town, and one of his papers—a monograph on Ugandan petroglyphs, still indecipherable—caught my eye. I wrote, applying for a job. and was promptly accepted.
I knew little of Zimbabwe. I knew it was the focal point of a vast system of mighty towers and ramparts spread out over something like three hundred thousand square miles of trackless jungle. The ruins are found in Mashonaland, the mining areas of Gwelo, Que-Que, and Selukwe. At the center, deep in southern Rhodesia, about two hundred and eighty miles from the sea in the valley of the Upper Metetkwe, lie the colossal fortifications of enigmatic Zimbabwe—greatest and most fabulous of the roughly five hundred stone structures found in this wide zone, which seem the work of a race unknown to history, and whose puzzling architecture has no parallel elsewhere on this planet, save in certain fearfully ancient ruins in Peru.
This little I had gleaned from that tantalizing book, Hall’s Great Zimbabwe, which raises so many disturbing questions and settles so very few—if any—of them. And soon I was to see the fantastic city myself!
MY first sight of mysterious Zimbabwe came at dusk. The sky was one supernal blaze of Carmine and vermilion flame, against which the titanic walls of the enclosure soared impressively, composed of massive blocks weighing each many tons, the wall extending hundreds of feet, enclosing the weird, uncanny "topless towers" of which I had heard. Mayhew's workmen had cleared away the vines and undergrowth which for ages had encumbered the gigantic rampart, but the jungle, I somehow knew, had not surrendered, but had merely retreated before superior force and was biding its time, waiting for the puny, ephemeral children of men to leave that it might inexorably regain its antique domain over the mighty walls and towers.
A shudder, as of eerie premonition, ran through me as I first gazed upon lost Zimbabwe drowsing the ages away. Then I forced a shaky laugh and put such trepidations from me; after all, night had nearly fallen, and the breeze was dank and wet.