One of those “rare pockets” was situated not far from the region in which we were fighting. Harrowby knew of the location of a subterranean city in the northern reaches of the Arghandab Valley, where the valley shaded into the lower foothills of the Himalayas. He had read about it in a book called Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or Unnameable Cults, by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, a copy of which, published in English in 1845 by Bridewall, he had chanced upon in a second-hand bookshop just off Charing Cross Road. Somewhere in the book’s one thousand pages was a description of a defile leading to a cavern wherein the city, known as Ta’aa, lies spread out, inviolate, the streets and houses perfectly preserved, untouched by wind or rain. Von Junzt had not seen this place for himself; he was merely citing reports found in other sources, obscure texts in ancient tongues. However, he was convinced of its existence, and so was Harrowby.
As we were preparing to resume the march to Kandahar, escorted by the relief force, Harrowby came to me with a proposal.
“Look here, Watson. We’re all footsore, battle-weary and deserving of respite. I’ve had an idea. We should return to Kandahar, of course, but what if we were to take a little detour along the way? A few of the men are up for it. You’re a solid, dependable chap, good in a pinch, and it’d make sense to have a sawbones along with us, just in case.”
“What are you suggesting? That we desert?”
“Keep your voice down. It won’t be desertion, it will be… diversion. Shouldn’t take us more than a week, if my calculations are correct. Ten days at the most. We can say we became detached from the main body of troops. We were disorientated and got lost. We’ll trundle into Kandahar the Sunday after next, looking suitably shamefaced and sorry for ourselves, and no one need be any the wiser. If the brass come down on us, I’ll take it all on my shoulders. Dad’s a chum of Field Marshal Roberts, so if we get into serious trouble I can always pull that particular string and have it all smoothed over. What do you say?”
“I suppose I should like to know why. Where will this detour of yours take us?”
“Can’t you guess?”
I could. It was obvious.
Ta’aa.
And I said yes. I have no idea why, other than the fact that Harrowby had enchanted me with the yarns he had spun, particularly about Ta’aa. To be so close to the city and not take the opportunity to look for it – this struck me as little short of perverse.
Thus, at the potential risk of court martial, a group of us held back as the column set off again. We lingered at the van, dragging our feet, until we were thoroughly engulfed in the dust cloud thrown up by the horses’ hooves, the men’s boots, and the wheels of the wagons and artillery caissons. By the time it cleared, the rest of the column had moved so far ahead as to be out of sight.
Leaving the fertile banks of the Arghandab river behind, we sallied forth into ragged, bare hill country. We had water and provisions and a faith in Captain Harrowby’s researches and orienteering skills. The July sun was ferocious, the air thin as a razor blade, and after a mere three days our eager little escapade had turned into a trudge. The men from the ordinary ranks started to grumble, and even I was beginning to have my misgivings. Harrowby exhorted us onward, as bouncy as a springer spaniel, but his enthusiasm for the expedition was shared less and less by those he was leading. Perhaps, we were thinking, this was all a bit of a mistake. Harrowby seemed confident about where we were going, but really! Lost underground cities. Books about long-defunct religious cults. Books by German authors, moreover. Who was to say the captain wasn’t taking us on a wild goose chase? There was precious little concrete proof that this Ta’aa had ever existed, beyond a few lines in a tome whose very title gave one cause to doubt the veracity of its contents.
By dawn of the fifth day the mood had turned mutinous. The men, all half-dozen of them, were tired, dispirited, and full of dark mutterings. I tried to rally them but my heart wasn’t in it. Even Harrowby himself seemed crestfallen, as though on the point of admitting defeat. We had climbed hill after hill, crossed valley after valley, and seemed no nearer our destination. There was a signpost, according to von Junzt, a marker that indicated unmistakably the entrance to the defile that led to Ta’aa. It was a granite pillar, standing some one hundred feet from base to apex, crowned with a weather-worn figure. Once we found that, we should know we were only a short journey from the city.
A passing goatherd proved our salvation – or, arguably, our damnation. Harrowby addressed him in clumsy Pashto, enquiring if he knew the whereabouts of said pillar. The man at once became very agitated. He pretended not to understand, but Harrowby pressed him, even going so far as to threaten him with a pistol, although I like to think he would not actually have stooped to using it. The goatherd, his wrinkled walnut face fixed in alarm, his gaping mouth showing toothless gums, confessed that he knew of the pillar. He gave us directions. We could be there in half a day. He added a proviso, which Harrowby was unwilling to translate for the rest of us until we badgered it out of him. It was this. The goatherd had said that we should turn back and not even think of looking for the city. No Afghan went near there. Any who did came back quite deranged, or else failed to return at all. It was an evil place but, more than that, it was deadly.
By the time we had extracted this warning from Harrowby, we were almost halfway to the pillar. We chose not to let it deter us. Silly native superstition. Ignorant heathens. The Moslem could not be relied upon for common sense. We were British. We were soldiers. We had guns. Any perils we might encounter we were well able to meet.
The pillar towered on the horizon. When we reached it, each of us took a turn with Harrowby’s binoculars to inspect the figure that surmounted it. A hulking, crouching thing with the body of a man, the wings of a bat and a head like a squid, the statue was a forbidding sight. It seemed designed to make the casual visitor think twice before entering the mouth of the defile where it stood sentinel. Yet who would be a casual visitor to this remote, desolate spot? We were miles from anywhere. The last village we had passed, early the previous forenoon, had been a tiny cluster of huts only a quarter of which were tenanted. We were truly in no man’s land, with nothing around us but scrubby ochre slopes and yawning blue sky. The statue’s minatory mien was not intended for the likes of us, who had not wandered here by chance but had actively sought out this location.
Into the defile we went, Harrowby at the fore. A pebbly path wound between sheer rock walls, often becoming so narrow we were forced to go in single file. It ran for at least three miles from one end to the other, and as we walked we became subdued. There was something oppressive in the atmosphere of the place, the very geography itself. One felt hemmed in and at the same time vulnerable. The path inclined downward, the walls grew higher on either side, and the impression one gained was of being inside the jaws of a vice while the screw was being turned. The further one went, the more trapped one became.
Eventually, to our relief, the defile opened out, and across a kind of natural courtyard stood the entrance to the cavern, a cleft surrounded by extensive carvings. These, of remarkable quality and intricacy, depicted the same bat-winged creature that surmounted the pillar, lording it over men with the heads of lizards, who cowered cravenly before it. Elsewhere the lizard-headed men were seen slaughtering normal human beings, slitting their throats and cutting out their hearts and entrails with their clawed hands. In several of the images, the eviscerated innards were offered up to the bat-winged thing on dishes, as food. In others it was the lizard men themselves who feasted upon them, and on limbs and lesser organs as well.
Harrowby spent nearly an hour admiring the carvings and making sketches of them in his journal. He declared that this was one of the great archaeological finds of the decade, if not of the century, and we were all a part of it. He promised that when he returned to England and made an official announcement about it – to the Royal Society, where else? – each of us would receive our due share of the credit. I myself did not mind much whether or not
I was one of the first westerners ever to clap eyes on the carvings, or for that matter on the city of Ta’aa. As fascinating as Harrowby found the illustrations, I found them repugnant and intimidating. And I was not unique in that. The men were full of bravado, commenting crudely on this or that aspect of them, not least the nudity of all the figures shown and the grotesque Grand Guignol detail of the killings. Their voices trembled a little, however. Beneath the ribald jeering there was disquiet. Whoever had made these illustrations, one did not wish to be associated with those people in any way. The images attested to a sick, deviant temperament.
At last it was time to go in. Harrowby lit a lantern, we followed suit, and our wary procession passed through the cleft and down into the bowels of the earth.
* * *
For an episode I once tried my hardest to forget, it remains sharp in my memory, even today. In my dotage I have trouble remembering where I have left my reading spectacles and the name of the maidservant who draws my evening bath for me, yet the journey into Ta’aa and the flight out of it I can recall as clearly as though it happened yesterday.
A long tunnel, seemingly endless, suddenly gave onto a broad shelf of rock, an escarpment from which we looked out over a vast, sprawling cavern large enough to swallow a score of cathedrals. Lumpen sedimentary columns lent their support to its roof, the slenderest of them at least a dozen yards in diameter. At the further end a cataract glistened, fed by some aquifer and filling the air with its churning echoes. All this was visible courtesy of the eerie, eldritch light shed by a luminous fungus that clung in huge clumps to various surfaces.
Dousing our lanterns at Harrowby’s instruction, we let our eyes adjust to the purplish glow, and in its lambency perceived the outlines of buildings on the cavern floor. They were little more than rough-hewn, slab-built cubes, with hollow rectangular apertures for doors, arranged in a higgledy-piggledy street formation. At the very middle of them was a single larger structure whose size and centrality, along with its domed roof and colonnaded flanks, suggested religious or political significance: a temple or meetinghouse. Dwarfing and outclassing the surrounding edifices, it seemed the purpose of them, their raison d’être. They existed to service it, like a colony of ants their queen.
Our trepidation notwithstanding, we gasped at this vista. All of us, that is, save Harrowby, who wore a look of pure self-satisfaction. He was no doubt ranking himself with his heroes Schliemann and Evans, and likening his achievement to their discoveries of the sites of Troy and Knossos. I see now that, though charismatic, he was an arrogant, vain man, perhaps even foolish, albeit not so foolish as the rest of us who blindly, blithely accompanied him.
There were steps hacked out of the face of the escarpment, and we descended them, with Harrowby naturally in front. Soon we were parading through Ta’aa, blinking around us at the remains of a city that was old when dynastic Egypt was young. Aside from the carvings at the entrance there was little sign of cultural or domestic life. We saw no potsherds; no decoration around or in the houses, the few of them we looked inside; nor any open spaces that might have been marketplaces or squares. The temple, if temple it was, appeared to be the only place where the inhabitants were likely to have gathered and communed in numbers. That, consequently, became our goal. At Harrowby’s urging we navigated the mazy streets, making turns at junctions only if this served to bring us closer to it. All the while, the great waterfall hissed, muting the shuffle of our footsteps and forcing us to speak at normal volume when we would much rather have whispered, for whispering felt more appropriate and somehow safer. It was as if we had no wish to be overheard – and yet who could be there to eavesdrop? Ta’aa was a dead city, so long unoccupied that the bones of its denizens had crumbled to dust. We were alone. Surely we were alone.
The central building proved to be a place of worship after all, a shrine to the same loathsome hybrid monstrosity who perched on the pillar and dominated the carvings outside. Its likeness was etched onto all four external walls, and inside atop a large plinth stood another statue of it, this one a representation some thirty feet in height, wrought from black marble shot through with veins of a golden mineral. The idol’s bulbous head and plump, squat body I can recall only with a thrill of horror, and likewise the moment when, gazing up from by its feet, Harrowby gave voice to a word.
“Cthulhu.”
Initially I thought dust must have got up his nose and he had sneezed. Then he repeated the word, louder and with a kind of awe.
“Cthulhu.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Mean?” said he. “It means him, Watson.” He pointed up at the idol. “It is his name. Cthulhu. One of the Great Old Ones. The greatest, some say. Son of Nug. Half-brother of Hastur. Husband of Idh-yaa. Father of Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, Zoth-Ommog, Cthylla and Shaurash-Ho. Grandfather of Yogash the Ghoul. Great-grandfather of K’baa the Serpent. If von Junzt is to be believed, Cthulhu’s influence stretches far and wide across the globe. Haiti, Louisiana, the South Pacific, Mexico, Siberia, Greenland – you’ll find peoples that worship him still in all those places, and countless more. But it’s here, in Central Asia, that the faith has its heartland. It may be that this city is its nucleus – its sanctum sanctorum – or even its fons et origo. I can’t imagine there being a monument to him anywhere else that rivals this one. We have found the Cthulhu cult’s Westminster Abbey. All other shrines are mere chapels by comparison.”
I was minded to chide him for expressing such a blasphemous notion, but I doubted he would have cared. The bumptious lad was too caught up in the excitement of his discovery. Nothing could ruin the moment for him, not even when one of the men, Private Edginton, drew our notice away from the statue to an altogether more prosaic but no less sinister feature of the temple.
“Captain, sir, are those what I think they are?”
He was pointing to various heaps of bones that littered the floor of the shrine. I myself had not registered them upon entering the place. None of us had. The idol had commanded our attention to the exclusion of all else.
Harrowby bent to examine the nearest of the bone piles. He extricated one of the larger specimens and held it up for me to look at.
“What do you make of that, Doctor? Unless I am much mistaken, it’s a human femur.”
I could not help but concur. “There are characteristics to it that are unusual. It is inordinately curved, for one thing. The owner would have been very bow-legged. But it is human nonetheless.”
The men did not take this revelation well. They were even less happy when one of them, Lockwood, pointed out that the femur bore certain tell-tale scrapes and grooves on it. Lockwood had been an apprentice butcher back in Dorchester before signing up with the Fifth Northumberlands, and knew what a hambone looked like after it had been given to a hungry dog.
“Them’s gnaw marks, them is,” he said, “and no mistake.”
“Wild animals, opportunistically taking advantage of carrion,” Harrowby asserted confidently. “Wolves, or jackals. Hyenas maybe. There are even bears in these parts, I’m told.”
To my eyes, the gnaw marks were too blunt to have been made by the teeth of any of those creatures. Incisors and molars were responsible, not the canines of carnivores. Teeth that may well have been human. I kept the thought to myself, however. The men were already jittery. No point in unsettling them further.
Not that my reticence availed us anything, for another of the privates, Smythe, had picked up one of the many skulls that lay around us. At a cursory glance it might have passed for human. There were certainly a few undeniably human skulls amid the osseous detritus in the temple. Yet the cranium of this one had an elongated dome, and the frontal and occipital bones were both etiolated. The maxilla, meanwhile, was oddly elongated, and Smythe produced a separate mandible that matched, fully half as long again from ramus to chin as the human equivalent. The finishing touch was a broad, underdeveloped nasal aperture, suggestive of a flat, recessed nose.
All in
all, though human-like, it was not a human skull, not in the conventional sense. The only conclusion any of us could draw was a chilling one.
“The lizard-headed people from the carvings,” I said. “They exist.”
“Existed,” said Harrowby, correcting me. “A species of reptilian hominid hitherto unknown to science. These are the last corporeal relics of them. Gentlemen, we appear to have made not only archaeological but paleontological history today. Our names are going to be celebrated down through the ages. I can just hear them now at the Royal Society, the wisest heads in England cheering us to the rafters.”
“I’d settle for a bit of coin for my trouble,” said Lockwood.
“There’ll be riches aplenty,” Harrowby assured him. “The statue of Cthulhu alone is priceless. Assuming we can devise a means of getting it out of—”
“Hsst!” said Edginton. “Anyone else hear that?”
We listened hard. The only sound was the susurration of the waterfall, still dimly audible through the temple walls.
“It’s nothing,” Harrowby said at last. “Doubtless what you’re hearing is a fore-echo of the applause to come as our finds are unveiled before an audience of dignitaries at the British Museum a few months hence.”
The Cthulhu Casebooks Page 13
