The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

by H. P. Lovecraft

  8. In the first published version, the word “even” is omitted, but it appears in the manuscript and subsequent published versions.

  Aions (or aeons) are the emanations of God in the Gnostic system, the equivalent of the “Old Ones” of the Cthulhu cultists. It is no accident that the term “aeon” also means a span of time, or an age; and, according to Robert M. Price, in “The Old Ones’ Promise of Eternal Life,” Alhazred made knowing use of the pun. He concludes from both the form and content of the lines that the couplet is not Alhazred’s own work. “Rather,” Price asserts, “it is revealed as an ancient piece of traditional lore stemming from the Gnostic cult of the Aions” (10).

  9. Cf. John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” X, lines 13–14:

  One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

  And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

  Did Donne read the Necronomicon? In “Song,” lines 10–15, he hints of an interest in the occult:

  If thou be’st born to strange sights,

  Things invisible to see,

  Ride ten thousand days and nights,

  Till age snow white hairs on thee,

  Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me,

  All strange wonders that befell thee.

  10. Twin colossi were built in Thebes around the fourteenth century BCE by the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III, bearing his own image; these eventually formed part of his own memorial temple. The Greeks later claimed that the colossi were depictions of the Hellenic hero Memnon, described by Homer in The Iliad as the son of Tithonus and the dawn (Eos). In 28 BCE, the statues were partially destroyed by an earthquake. Subsequently, the eastern colossus was reported to emit a singing sound at dawn. (The effect was probably the result of the evaporation of dew in the porous stone and ceased to be reported after reconstruction of the statues in the late second or early third century CE.) The colossus was thereafter known as the Vocal Statue of Memnon and became associated with a myth that the statue depicted Memnon singing a daily greeting to his mother.

  The Colossi of Memnon.

  11. The ancient capital of the Meroitic kingdom, which began in Egypt with the 25th Dynasty around 800 BCE; the city flourished until ca. 350 CE.

  12. A rare explorer to imagine that there were builders before humankind!

  13. A land near modern Iraq; at some point in its history, it probably ruled Babylon, approximately 600 BCE. The Chaldeans are not an old civilization compared to some of the others mentioned earlier.

  14. These places feature in the story “The Doom That Came to Sarnath,” written by Lovecraft and first published in 1920. The tale tells of the destruction of the metropolis of Sarnath more than 10,000 years ago by the vengeance of the people of Ib, whom Sarnath had exterminated, and their lizard-god Bokrug. Mnar and Ib are also mentioned in At the Mountains of Madness (here, below).

  15. A pagan scholar (ca. 458–538 CE), best known for his commentaries on Plato and Aristotle. What his “apocryphal nightmares” might be is unknown.

  16. French priest and poet. His name is more often spelled without the h. The book was published around 1246 CE and mixes poetry, cosmology, astrology, and depictions of a spherical earth (a concept not yet universally acknowledged). It was widely translated during the Middle Ages. Sabine Baring-Gould, in Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1866), a copy of which was in Lovecraft’s library, mentions that Gautier “places the terrestrial Paradise in an unapproachable region of Asia, surrounded by flames, and having an armed angel to guard the only gate” (253), though, as Baring-Gould points out, many other medieval writers expressed similar views, and so it is hard to see how such a description could be described as “infamous.”

  Detail from a portrait of John Gower, ca. 1400, depicting a spherical world, with compartments representing earth, wind, and water.

  17. The mythical king of central Asia, named in the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) by the Persian poet Ferdowsi around 1000 CE. Afrasiab reportedly wandered over central Asia, hounded by the king of Iran, Kay Khosrow.

  18. The Greek name of the river Amu Dar’ya in central Asia.

  19. The tale “Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men,” first published in Sketch, February 8, 1911.

  20. A poet and balladeer, Moore (1779–1852) is as closely identified with Ireland as Robert Burns is with Scotland. He was close friends with Lord Byron; charged by Byron with publication of the Romantic poet’s memoirs after his death, Moore famously destroyed them, thinking them too honest to be read. Moore wrote a novel in 1827 entitled The Epicurean, about a Greek named Alciphron who experiences the rites of the Epicurean sect as well as initiation into Christianity at a monastery. The conceit of the book is that it is a translation of a manuscript found in Egypt at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In 1839, Moore published an epic poem, Alciphron, from which this quotation is drawn. Alciphron travels from Greece to Egypt to explore mysteries; he discovers a huge well far beneath a pyramid and has many experiences similar to those that befall the narrator of “The Nameless City,” including entering a small chapel and encountering clanging metallic gates.

  21. The word should be “all.”

  22. The Paleozoic era extended from 542 million years ago to 251 million years ago. According to fossil evidence, large sophisticated reptiles were the highest form of life. Having not yet seen anything reptilian, the narrator has no reason to guess that the ruin is actually that old. Possibly he simply means that it is really, really old.

  23. The Paleogene period was from 65 million years ago to about 25 million years ago. Mammals appeared during this period, and indeed primates appeared at its end, just as South America and Africa separated and the Atlantic Ocean grew. Africa did not rise “out of the waves”; it was part of the supercontinent popularly called Pangaea and its position did not change. The Sahara Desert has seen at least two fertile spells, one prior to the last Ice Age and one after the end of the last Ice Age, beginning around 10,500 BCE and ending around 5000 BCE.

  24. Irem or Iram, the City of a Thousand Pillars, is a “lost” city of the Arabian Peninsula, mentioned in the Quran: “Have you not considered how your Lord dealt with Aad / With Irem of lofty pillars / the like of which has never been seen in the Land?” (Q’uran, chap. 89, 6–14). Excavations of the city of Ebla in Syria in 1973 produced records showing that, 4,500 years ago, Ebla had traded with Iram. It is unclear whether this “Iram” is the same city.

  According to the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed.), “Very gorgeous are the descriptions given [by Arab chroniclers] of ‘Irem,’ the ‘city of pillars,’ as the Koran styles it, supposed to have been erected by Shadad, the latest despot of ‘Ad in the Regions of Hadramant’; and which yet, after the annihilation of its tenants, remains entire, so Arabs say, invisible to ordinary eyes, but occasionally, and at rare intervals, revealed to some heaven-favoured traveller” (II, 255b).

  25. This couplet also occurs in “The Call of Cthulhu.” See text accompanying note 52 in that story.

  26. The narrator’s meaning here is unclear. Abaddon was originally a place-name, a region of the underworld and in particular, a realm of the cursed sacrificial grounds of Gehenna. Some scholars treat Abaddon as the angel of death and destruction (the name is derived from the Hebrew אבד, which means “to perish”); others contend that he is a good angel, holding the key to the bottomless pit. The primary source for information about Abbadon is Revelation 9:1–11, which characterizes him as the “king” of the pit:

  And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.

  And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

  And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

  And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the
earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

  And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.

  And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

  And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.

  And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.

  And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.

  And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.

  And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. (King James Version)

  27. This great word just means a bad demon, from the Greek kakos (bad) and daimon (divinity or spirit).

  The Hound1

  In many ways the most Poe-like of all Lovecraft’s stories, and the first to appear in Weird Tales, with which Lovecraft would be indelibly linked, “The Hound” combines elements of classic horror fiction from a variety of literary progenitors. It also includes the first mention by name of Alhazred’s Necronomicon. While S. T. Joshi calls the story “roundly abused for being wildly overwritten,” he sees it as a deliberate parody. Its “adjectivitis” mocks the prose of Poe and other writers whom Lovecraft admired, including Ambrose Bierce and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Lovecraft again casts the tale as a suicide note. Unlike in the case of the “epicure of the terrible” who relates “The Picture in the House,” however, it is too late for this narrator to be saved!

  I.

  In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream—it is not, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

  St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch2 phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.

  May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every æsthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the Symbolists3 and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphælites4 all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal.

  Only the sombre philosophy of the Decadents5 could hold us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robing.6

  I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even partly the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the great stone house where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far, far underground; where huge winged dæmons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odours our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!—the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered grave.

  Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, life-like bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist’s art, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.

  Statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St. John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnamable drawings which it was rumoured Goya7 had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind,8 on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodæmoniacal ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. It is of this loot in particular that I must not speak—thank God I had the courage to destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself.

  The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of æsthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the earth. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St. John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that mocking, that accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.

  By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? I think it was the dark rumour and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre. I can recall the scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odours of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this selfsame spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.9

  I remembered how we delved in this ghoul’s grave with our spades, and how we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the sickening odours, the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure.

  Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the long-undisturbed ground. It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we finally pried i
t open and feasted our eyes on what it held.

  Much—amazingly much—was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper’s neck. It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face,10 and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade.11 The expression on its features was repellent in the extreme, savouring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St. John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a maker’s seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

  Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, but as we looked more closely we saw that it was not wholly unfamiliar. Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognised it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred;12 the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng,13 in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab dæmonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.