The entire passage contained only seven lines divided into three verses. Hoskins recopied them upon a blank sheet of writing paper, leaving a space between each line, and laboriously attempted a full translation with the use of Tuttle's "R'lyehian Key."
When he was finished some hours later, the page read as follows:
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh fhtagn.
(In His House at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.)
Y'ai 'ng'ngah cf'ayak shugg-yaah Cthulhu nafl fhtagn.
(But in the Hour which cometh when Cthulhu no longer waits dreaming,)
N'yba-naaab ‘vygh glag'ng aargb-cf'ayah y’baa mgl'gn.
(Then let the world beware the coming-hence of its Master.)
Ygnaiih! Ygnaiih! S'sathagua dy'uth aiih-cf'ayagh!
(I rise! I rise! Up from the depths I come!)
Mgw-ygna! Mgw-ygna! S'sathagua mglw'nafh ph' R'lyeh!
(He rises! He rises! Up from His House in R'lyeh!)
Mgw-cf'ayak! G'ngah mglw' aargh-cf'ayah n'gh yafl.
(He cometh! The Hour of His coming-hence is at hand.)
Ygnaiih! Aiih-cf'ayagh-ngwa! Uaaah ‘nygh sh'uggua mng mgl'gn.
(I rise! I come forth! Let the world tremble before its Master.)
Hoskins scared at the result of his labors, curiously rapt with a fascination such as he had never felt before. It seemed to him that he was on the brink of recovering an incredible trove of wisdom lost for centuries or ages.
To his surprise, he noticed that it was dawn. He had coiled all night over the "R’lychian Key", not even noticing the hours as they raced by. No wonder he was shaking with fatigue and exhaustion!
That day he did nor report to work at the library, pleading a temporary indisposition. Instead, he slept the deep sleep of physical and nervous exhaustion.
And again there were dreams ...
ON previous such occasions, the dreams of Hoskins had been filled with dark desert landscapes framed with sharp-fanged peaks whereon untrodden snows gleamed palely beneath the cold eye of the peering moon. His dreams were tumultuous with glimpses of crumbling slopes of awesomely ancient stone, the parched and wrinkled floors of prehistoric seas—grim and frightful vistas which reeked of bleak desolation, barrenness, utter sterility and absence of life.
Now during his day-long slumber, Hoskins dreamed of a squat, ugly turret or tower crudely cut from dark porous stone, which stood alone in a frightful waste. Darkness hung over this scene, nor could even the curious eye of the inquisitive moon penetrate the sky, obscured as it was with a film of lowering vapors ... but, now and again, rifts appeared in the clouded firmament, wherethrough glittered icily stars.
Not the known, familiar stars and constellations that Hoskins knew from his childhood: No, these weird stars were formed into constellations unknown to him yet strangely meaningful, as if they shaped enormous symbols vaguely familiar to his dreaming intellect. The sensation was one of unearthly strangeness; yet it was also hugely portentous, as if vast realms of knowledge were contained in those starry symbols which he could—almost—discern.
Of the stone tower amid the desolation he could make out few details, so gloomy was the umbrage which shrouded its rearing bulk and so obscure and fitful the wan luminance shed by those unknown constellations. There radiated from the uncouth angles of that squat, misshapen tower a cold and timeless malignancy ... an implacable and cunning hatred of ... of what? Of living things? Of life itself, perhaps?
In an upper, circular window of the turret-like tower, a ruddy light came and went, like unto the revolving beam of a lighthouse. There drifted through the dreaming brain of Bryant Hoskins a cryptic phrase he had come across in the mad pages of the—
The Elder Pharos ...
Odd, how in dreams the mind picks up wisps and shards of scattered memories and fits them together into a new pattern whose significance, upon awakening, we dismiss.
He woke in twilight, pervaded with a curious languor, as if made weary by his own dream-venturings.
DURING the weeks that followed. Bryant Hoskins paid scant attention to his duties at the library, devoting as many of his waking moments as he could possibly do to translating the whole of the R'lyeh Text. Turtle's glossary proved flawed and many of the meanings Tuttle had recorded Hoskins replaced with more correct definitions ... although how he came by them even he could not have said. Intuition, perhaps.
Gradually, however, the pattern of meaning buried in the mysterious language began to emerge into view. The Text was a melange of chants and prayers, litanies and incantations to several divinities which bore names like Cthulhu, Idh-yaa, Zoth-Ommog, Ubb, Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, Dagon, Hydra, and Yeb. These were all, it appeared from the context, elemental spirits of the waters of the earth, demon-godlings of the sea. They were, he deduced, severally imprisoned at various sites along the ocean’s floor— Cthulhu in the sunken stone city of R'lych, his son Ythogtha at Yhe, Zoth-Ommog in a submarine abyss near the "Island of the Stone Cities" (a term which, for some reason, again perhaps intuition, reminded Hoskins of the island of Ponape, with its colossal ruins of Nan-Matal), and Ghatanothoa in a sealed crypt atop the submerged mountain of Yaddith-Gho.
Each of these sea demons was served by tribes of minions. Cthulhu by the deep ones whose leaders were “Father Dagon and Mother Hydra"—names, of course, familiar to Hoskins from earlier reading. For example, Dagon was the sea god of the Philistines and Hydra a monster-goddess from Greek mythology. Ythogtha and Zoth-Ommog, on the other hand, were served by a race called the Yuggs, whose leader was Ubb, "Father of Worms”; and Ghatanothoa had the dark ones as his servitors, under their leader, Yeb.
These last three, it seems, were the sons (or "spawn,” as the R'lyeh Text phrased it) of Cthulhu himself, sons which he had begotten in forgotten aeons upon the final member of this grim pantheon, Idh-yaa. According to what Hoskins was slowly piecing together from these rituals and incantations, these entities had all descended to this earth from the stars when the world was newly made, long ages before the rise of humankind. All of them, apparently, except for Idh-yaa the Mighty Mother, who abided yet upon a distant star or world Called "Xoth", which was her natal place, as Cthulhu himself had been spawned upon another world called “Vhoorl.”
It was difficult to know exactly what to make of this weird mythology, which dealt with such advanced cosmological notions as distant galaxies and travel through the dimensions. Indeed, it sounded like the scientific romances of H. G. Wells which Hoskins had devoured in his 'teens, or like some of the stories he had glanced at in the pages of a pulp fiction magazine called Amazing Stories, which had begun appearing on the newsstands only two years before.
And there was another mystery.
Not every night, to be sure, but often enough for their frequency to become vaguely frightening, Hoskins in his dreams returned again and again to those bleak and gloom-shrouded vistas of a frigid, desolate wasteland he hail come to think of as Leng. And to within sight of that misshapen and lonely tower, that squat and crudely carven turret, which brooded on the plain, ever casting its flicker of ruddy luminance from the upmost circular window ....
What could this dead plateau have to do with the tombs of imprisoned gods upon the floor of the Pacific? Why did his sleeping brain—as apparently it did—draw a connection between a frozen and lifeless plateau and the black sea-bottoms? Was it only because of his knowledge that Amos Tuttle had bought the old book from the dark and cryptic heart of Asia, through the medium of a Chinese priest in a lamasery on the northern borders of Tibet?