"Churchward was an occultist of sorts." I protested. "His reputation as a scientist has never been taken seriously!"
“Nevertheless, the Easter Island Tablets exist—you can find excellent photographs of them in back files of National Geographic, without needing to search mote deeply into the scholarly periodicals. And I trust you are aware of the veracity, if not of the significance, of the inscriptions found at the site of Mohenjo-Daro?”
I nodded, my resistance to his arguments subsiding. But—how could this mystery be explained, save by postulating some worldwide prehistoric race or network of religious cults which have hitherto eluded the attention of scholars?
Baffled, I turned to other tasks, abandoning speculation.
WITH the help of the amiable Dr. Arnold, Professor Mayhew and I had clear and distinct photographic copies of the notebook made for further study and comparison with the inscriptions on the Black Stone, since obviously the Kester Library could not permit Yogash’s notebook to leave the premises, as it was a part of the Hoag papers.
For days and weeks we compared the symbols, jotting down a rough rendering into English. The grammar and punctuation, of course, had to be supplied by the professor and myself, as it was not possible to deduce from the notes of Yogash what equivalents of these were in the unknown language of the Scripture. From a study of the notebook, many bits of data came to light which meant little to me at the time, but which excited the professor tremendously.
"So!" he exclaimed one evening, "the language is neither any known form of Naacal, nor is it R’lyehian or even Tsath-yo ... I had rather conjectured it might be a form of Tsath-yo ... but, no. Yogash refers to it in six places as 'the Elder Tongue' and in two places as ‘the Elder Script’—"
"I’ve heard you mention that word ‘Tsath-yo’ before," I interjected. "What exactly does it refer to?"
“It was the language of ancient Hyperborea in prehistoric times,” he muttered offhandedly.
“Hyperborea?” I exclaimed, skeptically. "The polar paradise of Greek mythology? I believe Pindar refers to it in—"
"The conjectural name—lacking a better one!—for a polar civilization which was the presumed link between elder Mu and the more recent civilizations of Atlantis, Valusia, Mnar, and so on. Although Cyron of Varaad, in his brief Life of Eibon, does indeed suggest that the first humans migrated from foundering Mu to Valusia and the Seven Empires, and Atlantis as well, then in its barbaric period, before traveling north to Hyperborea ...."
I could make little or nothing of these rambling explanations, but filed them away for future reference. My concepts of ancient history, I perceived, were going to require some extensive revisions if I must include therein, as true and veritable cultures, such fairy tales as Mu and Hyperborea and Atlantis.
That night my bad dreams bothered me again, and I awoke soaked in cold sweat and shivering like a leaf in a gale. Across the room I saw the white moonlight bathing the eerily inscribed facets of the Black Stone, and suddenly I felt an uncanny and inexplicable fear. Or was it—foreboding?
BEFORE many weeks had passed, Professor Mayhew gradually came to understand the purpose and nature of the mysterious inscriptions on the Black Stone from Zimbabwe.
They were nothing less than litanies and ceremonials for the summoning—the "calling down", to employ the ominous phrase of the Stone's language—of the Fishers from Outside which were the minions and servitors of the dark demon-god Groth-golka. Odd, how my weird dreams had seemed to predict this very discovery, for those horrible nightmares which had plagued me from the first day I laid eyes on the accursed Stone had been of rituals whereby the hideously masked priests had seemed to call down from the nighted skies those horrible bird-things (the professor had discovered, in deciphering the Stone, that they were properly termed “shantaks”)! But here I caught myself beginning to take almost for granted that one's dreams can actually presage the future.
As for the dark divinity they served, Groth-golka was presumed by this mythology to dwell beneath the "black cone" of Antarktos, a mountain in Antarctica, at or very near to the South Pole. (Of course, I am translating these concepts: The actual text calls it "the anteboreal Pole", and the name "Antarktos” was supplied by the professor himself.)
When he had gotten to that portion of the translation, he seemed to hesitate, to become lost in dreams. I asked him if all was well, if he felt ill; he roused himself with an effort, and gave me a shadowed smile.
"It is nothing; a momentary qualm. No, Sloan ... I called to mind a scrap of verse I have somewhere read—I cannot think just where—but the name Antarktos was attached to it—"
And in a low, throbbing voice, he recited these strange lines:
Something in his hushed, hoarse voice—or was it in those grim and ominous lines of verse?—made me shudder uncontrollably. I thought again of my weird dreams of that Plain of Megaliths, of those naked bodies bound for sacrifice, and of the semi-avian monstrosities as they swooped, and plunged, and clutched and clawed, ripping and tearing the naked, writhing meat staked out for them ....
And again that night I had ... unwholesome dreams.
TWO days after this incident—and fear not, officers, my story is very nearly done—the professor seemed to have concluded the major portion of his researches. That is, as far as I could tell he had finished deciphering the last of the Summoning rituals of the shantaks cut deep on the slick metallic planes of the Black Stone.
"Sloan, I want you to go to the Kester today," he told me that afternoon, just when I had assumed our day’s toil was done. "I will need the text of this part of the Book of Eibon—" and here he handed me a scrap of paper torn from his pocket notebook, with page numerals scribbled down. I gave him a surprised look.
"But surely the library is closed by this time. Professor, and I could make the trip tomorrow morning—?”
He shook his head. "I need the text of that passage tonight. The library, staff are on hand and qualified scholars with passes signed by Dr. Arnold should be able to gain entry without difficulty. Take care of this at once, please."
Well, there was no refusing such a request—Professor Mayhew was my employer, after all—so I left the University Club and caught the streetcar on Banks Street to the library. The sky was lowering and gray; a fitful, uneasy wind, chill and dank as a breath from the very grave, prowled amid the dry leaves of early fall as I hurried between the granite pillars and into the bronze gateway.
I found no difficulty in securing the Book of Eibon from the files and began copying down the passage which the professor required. It consisted of certain matter from the seventh chapter of Part III of the Eibon, a lengthy mythological or cosmological treatise called "Papyrus of the Dark Wisdom.” The passage read as follows:
... but great Mnomquah came not down to this Earth but chose for the place of His abiding the Black Lake of Ubboth which lieth deep in the impenetrable glooms of Nug-yaa beneath the Moon's crust; but, as for Groth-golka, that brother of Mnomquah, He descended to this Earth in the regions circumambient to the Austral Pole, where to this day He abideth the passage of the ages beneath the black cone of Mount Antarktos, aye, and all the hideous host of Shantaks that serve Him in His prison merit, they and their Sire, Quumyagga, that is the first among the minions of Groth-golka, and that dwelleth either in the nighted chasms beneath black Antarktos or in the less inaccessible of the peaks of frightful Leng; where also did great Ithaqua, the Walker Upon the Wind, take for His earth-place the icy Arctic barrens, and mighty Chaugnar Faugn dwelleth thereabouts as well, and fearsome Aphoom Zhah, who haunteth the black bowels of Yaanek, the ice-mountain at the Boreal Pole, and all they that serve Him, even the Ylidheem, the Cold Ones, and their master, Rlim Shaikorth—