Like a black glistening moon He rose above the brink, a gigantic hemisphere of quaking slime, vaster than any mountain. Faceless and neckless was He, save that from His front a terrific beak thrust forth. Cruel and terrible and curved was this beak of blackest adamant, and it measured many thousands of paces in its length.
And then, half a league further along the brink of the chasm, a second hemispheric, black, glistening, beaked head rose into sight—and another!—and then yet a fourth mountainous and colossal beaked head rose above the lip of the Abyss!
And then it was true terror smote me to the heart, for I saw and knew my lord in His awfulness ... and we trembling mortals were dwarfed by Him, like motes before the ponderous yakith lizard were we ... and, suddenly, horribly, I knew what I had done.
The acolyte huddled at my feet knew in the same instant, and squealed shockingly, and wallowed in squalid and gutless terror, wriggling from before the altar of the Abomination ... to flee, staggering and stumbling, white to the lips, with wide, mad, staring eyes that burned with pale fire like sick moons ... and I, too, quailed to the depths of my being, and turned on palsied and trembling limbs, hurling from me with sudden horror the loathsome volume of the Rituals, which fell into the Abyss from which ultimate and mind-blasting Nightmare had but part-way emerged ... and I ran—ran—while the Earth shook and great crevices opened to split the land asunder ... ran, while mountain after mountain erupted in flame and thunder, and the sea boiled madly, and a great terrible shaft of unearthly light burned down the star-gulfs from distant and blazing Glyu-Vho ... ran, even as down that terrific star-beam descended, from the remote star that flamed like a wrathful and revenging Eye athwart the smoke-veiled and volcano-shaken west, terrible great Things like terrific Towers of Flame ... which I knew to be either the Elder Gods or Their servants ... while sky-tall and burning Towers swept the Abyss with their lightnings—and I fled through the gates of Yu-Haddoth, where dwelleth my king, but which lay now in smoking ruin, shaken by the great tremors of the Earth—and I scourged the panic-stricken multitudes before me—who knew not the true nature of the monstrous and inconceivable Thing I had almost freed—drove them shrieking into the vidya valutas, the ancient sky chariots of elder and doom-fraught Mu ... while the ground shook and the towers fell and mountain after mountain erupted in thunderous flames ... and we fled through the storm-torn skies and across the wind-lashed waves ... fled all that unending night of flame and doom and chaos, while behind our sky-borne keels immemorial and terror-haunted Mu crumbled under the mighty waves that beat in from the angry sea, and broke apart, shaken to its unstable core by the convulsions of outraged nature, lashed by starry fires of the Elder Gods ... on we flew at length into a distant land near the Hidden Gates of elder Shamballah itself ... but mere distance can not erase from my terror-frozen brain the ultimate glimpse of nethermost Hell that shook my soul when I saw ... and knew ... that vast and beaked and mountainous Head of the Thing in the Pit ... that awful and aeon-accursed Thing whose unthinkably prodigious FINGERTIPS I had seen ....
1. Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, in his impressively researched Unaussprechlichen Kulten (XXI, 307). identifies this date as B.C. 173,148.
2. Evidence in the Ponape Scripture (particularly the astronomical data in Versicle 9759) suggests this date may be equivalent to roughly B.C. 161,844; von Junzt does nor include any reference to this period, as his commentary breaks off several millennia earlier.
3. The cryptic and horrible Ponape Scripture says that Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zuth-Ommog are "the Sons of the mighty Cthulhu, Lord of the Watery Abyss and dread and awful Potentate of drowned R'lyeh." While neither the Scripture nor any other text of elder lore known to me records the planet wherefrom Cthulhu descended to this world, the Scripture says of the origin of his three sons: "The Spawn of Cthulhu came down from remote and ultra-telluric Xoth, the dim green double sun that glitters like a daemonic eye in the blacknesses beyond Abbith, to whelm and reign over the steaming fens and bubbling slime-pits of the mist-veiled dawn aeons of this Earth, and it was in primordial and shadowy Mu that They were great." Von Junzt (XXI, 29-a) cannot identify Xoth save to say that it lies in the same star cluster as Zaoth, Abbith, and Ymar. The reference to the "Isle of the Sacred Stone Cities" and the Deep that lies off its shores, together with geographical data hinted at earlier in the Zanthu Tablets, enables me to identify tentatively the place whereat Zoth-Ommog the Dweller in the Deep lies imprisoned as a submarine chasm off Ponape.
4. The hierophant Zanthu is in error here, for the surviving fragments of the Susran myth cycle list a copy of "the Yhe Rituals from elder Mu" as among the necromantic tomes in the library of the great magician Malygris, according to the inventory recorded by the sorcerer Nygron, and an incredibly ancient copy of the Rituals was in the possession of the Saracen wizard Yakthoob, Alhazred's mentor, according to the Irem chapter of the Necronomicon (Narrative II).
A copy, perhaps the same Yakthoobic redaction, is rumored to have been found in a sealed tomb in Egypt about 1905.
5. In an often-quoted passage of the Necronomicon, Alhazred identifies this name, which is primal Naacal, as that of the star known to the Arabic astronomers of his day as Ibt al Janzab, which is to say, Betelgeuse.
IN “The Dweller in the Tomb”, we read the journal entries of Harold Hadley Copeland, thus seeing what he sees only shortly alter he himself sees it. What we are seeing is an eerily ineluctable process whereby, even against impossible odds of hardship, Copeland is irresistibly drawn to a predetermined conclusion/destination. What is the nature of that fate? It is that his own soul’s history must repeat itself. At the climax he recognizes that Zanthu is himself in an earlier incarnation, and that his mission was simply to replay his own actions from this earlier life. He says he “should have guessed it“, because he was already very close to experiencing his moments of ominous anticipation as memories. By reading his journal we are reliving his story, which in turn was a reliving of his own story as Zanthu. This makes Carter’s retitling significant in retrospect. Why is the adventure of Harold Hadley Copeland called by the name of Zanthu? Why isn’t it named for the actual protagonist? It is—Copeland is Zanthu! (“So why’d you nix Carter’s title change, Price?” Because I happen to like Mythos stories with corny, campy titles better than those with a single piece of mute glossolalia as a title. I’ve done the same thing with “Zoth-Ommog”, as you’ll note.)
“The Thing in the Pit” is presented as a rediscovered first-person memoir of horrific events of the remote past, making it a window on the past. “Our of the Ages”, on the other hand, is another case of infinite regress. Here we are reading another journal, a dream diary by Henry Stephenson Blaine, so we are leeching off his perceptions. Through his dreams Blaine himself seems to be reliving ancient perceptions, visions, of the ocean-depth blasphemies that are slowly but surely making their insidious return through the whole story cycle. In the next installment, “The Horror in the Gallery” (“Zoth-Ommog”), we see yet more, but through still a different window. We read over narrator Hodgkins’ shoulder as he reconstructs the outlines of the "Alhazredic demonology" from the pages of shunned texts, including the Necronomicon. Finally, in “The Winfield Heritance", we will join the narrator as he begins to relive the spiritual seduction that befell his late uncle once he takes possession of his ancestral home. Each rare and evil volume he discovers hidden away behind the library shelves and within the furniture of secret rooms brings him further down the perilous path to the past.