Mayhew I found a devoted, even fanatic, scientist. His peculiar fixation on the legend of the "Fishers from Outside” set by, he was a learned and scholarly man. He told me something of the Groth-golka myth and discussed what scraps of knowledge had been accumulated as to the history of the stupendous ruin before us. The Portuguese had first glimpsed it about 1550, he told me, but the first explorer did not reach these parts until 1868.
“I understand no inscriptions have ever been found," I murmured. He nodded, his lean, ascetic face serious and troubled.
"Yes, and that's another mystery! A race that can build a stone wall fourteen feet thick, in an elliptical enclosure eight hundred feet in circumference, should surely have some form of writing, if only for the required mathematics,” he mused.
“And no artifacts have ever been found?” I hazarded.
“Only these," he said somberly, holding out a wooden tray. Within I saw a number of small, oddly shaped objects of baked clay and carved stone. They resembled curiously stylized birds, but not like any birds I know ... there was something misshapen, deformed, even—monstrous about them. I repressed a shiver of distaste.
“Do you know what they represent?” I asked faintly.
For a long moment he peered down at the tray of tiny artifacts, gazing at them through his eyeglasses, a pair of pince-nez spectacles he wore always, looped about his throat on a long ribbon of black silk. These pince-nez were his most famous affectation, and I knew of them long before I ever came to know the man himself.
Then he turned and looked at me.
"Perhaps the Fishers from Outside," he said, his voice dropping to a faint, hoarse whisper. “Or, perhaps, their mighty Master ... Groth-golka."
Something in the uncouth, harsh gutturals of that strange name made me wish, obscurely, that he had not spoken it aloud. Not here, amid the immemorial ruins of elder Zimbabwe ....
I SHALL not bore you with any extended account of the many weeks it rook to complete our excavations. First, we investigated the weird topless towers, which were devoid of any interior structure, save for thick stone piers jutting at intervals into the hollow, chimney-like interior. They were uncannily reminiscent of the pegs in an aviary, the perches in a bird cage, it seemed to me: but I said nothing, leaving the professor to his own conjectures.
Within a month I was sent upriver to obtain supplies. I was rather glad of this, for I would miss our work in the Plain of Megaliths. There was something about this vast and level field, covered with row on row of mammoth stone cubes, that made me think of hundreds of Druidic sacrificial altars. As the date of their excavation approached, my sleep was disturbed by dark dreams in which I seemed to see hundreds of squirming naked blacks bound to row after row of the altar stones ... while weirdly bird-masked shamans raised an eerie, cawing chant beneath the peering moon, whose cold eye was obscured by drifts of reeking smoke from many fires ....
Terrible dreams they were!
Upriver, I found the trading post and loitered there long enough for the excavations to be completed on the Plain of Megaliths. My host was a local tradesman of Boer descent, who questioned me intently about our work and eyed me furtively from time to time, as if there were questions he did not quite dare ask.
“Ever heard of the ‘Great Old Ones’?” he blurted one night, his courage bolstered by rum. I shook my head.
“I don't think so,” I said. "What are they, some native legend?"
“Yes ... but, mein Gott! ... native to what world, I could not say!”
I stared at him, baffled; before I could ask another question, he abruptly changed the subject and began to talk lewdly and disgustingly about the local native women. I left downriver the next day with the supplies.
It seems I had lingered at the Ushonga trading post longer than had been needful; the Plain of Megaliths had been excavated, and the diggers had turned up nothing more interesting than hundreds of the little bird-like Stone images. Mayhew had therefore turned his attention to the great Acropolis, and beneath the foundations of the huge center stone a remarkable discovery had been made.
He showed it to me by the wavering light of a hissing kerosene lamp, tenderly unwrapping the odd-shaped thing with hands that shook with excitement. I stared at it in awe and amazement ... yes, even as I had stared at Zimbabwe itself that first night ... and with a cold inward shudder of ghastly premonition, too.
The Black Slone.
It was a decahedron, a ten-sided mass of flinty, almost crystalline black stone which I could not at once identify. From the weight of it, I guessed it to be some sort of metal.
“Meteoric iron," Mayhew whispered, eyes alive with feral enthusiasm, behind the glinting lenses of his pince-nez, for once askew. "Cut from the heart of a fallen star ... and look at the inscriptions!''
I peered more closely: Each of the ten angled sides was a sleek plane of glistening black, covered with column on column of minute characters or hieroglyphs in a language unknown to me, though naggingly familiar. They in no slightest way resembled hieratic or demotic Egyptian, or any other form of writing I could remember having ever seen. I later copied some of them down in my notebook and can reproduce a few specimens here:
The professor reverently turned the metallic block over. “This side in particular." he said in a low voice.
I stared at the weird, stylized profile figure of a monstrous thing like a hideous bird with staring eyes and a gaping beak filled with fangs. There was a stark ugliness to the depiction that was quite unsettling.
I looked up at him, a mute question in my eyes. “Groth-golka" he breathed.
WITHIN the week we departed for the States. Nor was I at all loath to go, for all the excitement of our excavations and the discoveries they had unearthed. To tell the truth, ever since that night I had first set eyes on the Black Stone, I had not been sleeping at all well, A touch of jungle fever, perhaps, but night after night I tossed and turned, my dreams a mad turmoil of frightful nightmares ....
One night in particular, after I saw the Stone, I again dreamed of Zimbabwe as it might have looked at its height: the sacrificial smokes staining the sky and obscuring behind lucent veils the white face of the leering moon as it gloated down on scores of writhing blacks bound to the stone altars, grotesquely masked priests leaping in a wild and savage dance ....
I knew that they were trying to call down from the stars some monstrous horror-god, but how this knowledge came to me I cannot really say. Then the moon was hidden by black, flapping shapes that circled and swooped like enormous fishing-birds, darting down to the altars to pluck and tear at the wriggling bodies bound there ... and one of the huge, queerly deformed-looking bird-things emerged into the moonlight, and I stared with unbelieving horror at its hulking, horribly quasi-avian form, clothed with scales not feathers ... one glimpse of the repulsive thing with its one leg and glaring Cyclopean eye and hideous, hooked, fang-lined beak—
I woke screaming, with a bewildered Mayhew shaking me by the shoulders, demanding to know what was the matter.
No, I wasn’t unhappy to be going home: I had had more than my fill of the sinister brooding silence of that thick, fetid jungle, crowding so ominously close to the ruins as if waiting, waiting ... of that horribly old stone city, whose mysterious past contains hideous secrets I did not wish to plumb ....
The reason for our abrupt departure was quite easily explained. It would seem that Professor Mayhew had found what he had been looking for. The discovery of the Black Stone from Zimbabwe would make him very famous—and his fame would be all the greater, of course, were he able to decipher the inscriptions.