For he, as well, had half-recognized them. My vague, teasing recollection of having somewhere once seen something very much like those queer glyphs tormented me; I could neither pin it down nor could I get it out of my mind.
It was Mayhew, however, who remembered where he had seen symbols very much like them, and the moment he spoke of it I felt certain that he was right. The Ponape Scripture! I must have seen the glyphs reproduced in some Sunday supplement article about the cryptic old book. But the professor, of course, had studied the actual Ponape Scripture itself, in its repository at the Kester Library in Salem, Massachusetts. He had examined the actual book, written in an unknown tongue, and had compared it against the debatable English version prepared by Abner Exekiel Hoag’s bodyservant, a Polynesian half-breed from the isle of Ponape.
Mayhew hoped to find, somewhere, somehow, the key to the unknown language. On the boat, he fretted over that, sending radio-telegraph messages.
“Churchward would know, if he were alive, I’m sure of that,” he muttered. “His Naacal Key has never been published, but I have seen his speculative work on Tsath-yo and R’lyehian. Somewhere among his note's there might be data on this Ponapian glyph system, whatever it is called ....”
One night, as we neared the coastline, he burst into my cabin, triumphantly waving a piece of yellow paper.
"Churchward’s widow has given me permission to borrow his unpublished notebooks and papers!" he crowed, face unhealthily flushed, eyes bright with excitement. “A chance, at last!”
Privately. I doubted it. Bur I kept my reservations to myself.
We disembarked and went immediately to Salem, where the professor had reserved rooms for us at the University Club. The next morning, leaving me to unpack our notes, records, and sample artifacts, he was off to await the arrival of Churchward's papers. For days he pored through them in growing exasperation, for the author of The Lost Continent of Mu and other dubious works of pseudoscientific speculation had known nothing of the unknown language, it seemed.
“What about Hoag’s papers?” I suggested. “Perhaps his servant left a glossary or something; I know it was back in the seventeen hundreds, but still, since the Scripture is right here at the Kester, perhaps they hold the remainder of his library, as well.”
His eyes flashed and he smote his brow with a groan, dislodging his pince-nez from their perch. “A splendid idea, young fellow!” he cried. “My intuition on hiring you was right.”
The next day, I accompanied the professor to the library, where his scholarly credentials quickly gained us access to a private reading cubicle and to the strange old book itself. While he pored over it eagerly, I regarded the volume with thinly disguised repugnance. I recalled what little was known of its curious history: The famous “Yankee trader”, Abner Exekiel Hoag, of the Hoags of Arkham, had discovered the ancient book on one of his rum-and-copra trading ventures in the South Seas, back in 1734.
It was a weird document of many pages, inscribed with metallic inks of several colors on palm leaf parchment sheets, which were bound between boards of archaic wood. Carved with grotesque designs ... the very reek of the ages rose from it, millennia made almost palpable, like the miasma of age-old rottenness ....
I had read what the famous Pacific archaeologist Harold Hadley Copeland had written of the book in his own shocking and controversial The Prehistoric Pacific in the Light of the Ponape Scripture, which only increased my repugnance. Poor Professor Copeland, that once-brilliant and pioneering scholar, had developed an uncanny fixation regarding the so-called "lost continent of Mu" which some occultists and pseudoscholars, like Colonel Churchward, consider to have been the original birthplace of humanity—the "Atlantis of the Pacific."
Suddenly I became aware that Mayhew had turned upon me a glittering eye, bright with excitement.
"What is it, Professor?"
"Sloan, my boy, it's here ... many of the identical symbols we traced and copied from the Black Stone! See—" he indicated several of the symbols on the crumbling, half-decayed sheets of leather-tough native parchment, “here—and here, and—here!"
“Odd that you didn’t recognize them at once, when you first began making your tracings from the Stone," I murmured inanely, searching for something to say. He shrugged, restlessly.
“I only glanced over the original codex," he explained, “as I was more interested in the English version ... but look: I have tried as best I could to match the hieroglyph to the English text, with the following conjectural result—"
I glanced at the sheet of scribbled notepaper he brandished before me. I do not recall all of the symbols or their meanings, but of the three symbols I drew earlier in this statement, the first stood for the name or word "Yig ", the second for "Mnomquah.” and the third for—
"Groth-goIka!" Mayhew breathed, almost reverently.
For some reason, I shuddered as if an icy wind were blowing upon my naked soul.
THE Curator of Manuscripts at the Kester Library was Professor Edwin Winslow Arnold, a chubby-faced man with a cherubic smile and piercing blue eyes. He had obviously heard of my employer and knew somewhat of his academic reputation, for we found no obstacle in our path which would prevent us from examining the miscellaneous diaries and papers of Abner Exekiel Hoag. A large number of these were in the Massachusetts Historical Archives, of course, but these could hardly be expected to contain the information Professor Mayhew desired. The documents which related to the Ponape Scripture were in the "sealed" files, and were made available only to reputable scholars.
Within a day or two, Mayhew found what he was looking for, in the form of a battered, water-stained notebook obviously kept by Hoag’s man, Yogash. This Yogash was the bodyservant Hoag had "adopted" in the Pacific islands, a Polynesian/Oriental half-breed of some kind (weirdly there filtered into my memory a bit of nonsense poor mad Copeland had recorded in his book, The Prehistoric Pacific, in which he conjectured that this mysterious Yogash person might be, in his inexplicable phrase, "a human/Deep One hybrid", whatever that might mean).
Yogash had kept a workbook in which the English equivalents, often marked with an interrogation point in the margin, perhaps to indicate that the equivalency was dubious or uncertain, were aligned with columns of minutely inked glyphs. This was the key to the language of the Scripture, by perusal of which Mayhew hoped to be able to translate the secrets of the Black Stone.
"They are all here." gloated Mayhew, peering enthusiastically over the blurred, stained pages of the old notebook. “Nug, and Yeb, and their mother, Shub-Niggurath ... Yig and Mnomquah and Groth-golka himself—"
"Are these the gods of some Pacific mythology?” I hazarded.
"So they would appear to be, from their prominence in the Ponape Scripture," he murmured abstractedly.
"But—if that is true, then, how do you explain their recurrence on the other side of the globe, in the depths of South Africa?" I cried.
The Professor peered at me over his pince-nez.
"I cannot explain it," he said finally, after a moment's silence. “Any more than I can explain how virtually the same characters found on the Easter Island Tablets, whereof Churchward wrote, appear in the Mohenjo-Daro inscriptions, found in the northerly parts of India.”