The second bundle of news clippings, only half as thick as the first, contained much similar material, but located infrequent emergences from the deeps of an island containing a great chasm some thousands of miles to the south of the "R'lyeh emergences."
It was the third bundle, however, which caught my attention the most. These clippings, about a dozen in all, were about odd disappearances of sailing ships in the waters off Ponape. The earliest of these told of the disappearance at sea of the whaling ship Nebuchadnezzar, out of New Bedford, which vanished in the vicinity of Ponape with all hands in 1864. No storm was reported in the vicinity of Ponape—no storm anywhere in the Pacific on the date in question for a thousand miles—nothing but a peculiar, heavy, low-lying bank of fog.
A more recent clipping, from the Singapore Times for April 8, 1911, discussed the mysterious disappearance with all hands of the French warship Versailles. Again, no storm was reported, but heavy fog had overlaid the waters off Ponape.
One clipping in particular the Professor had marked with a large exclamation point. It came from the Honolulu Sentinel for June 17, 1922, and told a nightmarish and rambling story of a fleet of fishing boats manned by Ponape natives caught in a thick fog off the island and attacked by monstrous and horrible sea slugs, swollen to fantastic proportions, which slithered into the boats in some cases, catching the native fishermen in their mouths and dragging them over the side. More than forty unfortunates were lost in this manner, and the survivors, who were hospitalized in states ranging from incoherent raving hysteria to complete catatonic shock, repeated over and over again the meaningless word or exclamation “Hug!” or “Ugh!”
In the margin of this story, in Copeland’s hand, was written: “Yuggya! See Zan. Tab., IX, 2, lines 120-150.” This note referred to the puzzling and cryptic set of inscribed tablets Professor Copeland had brought back from the prehistoric stone tomb of a priest or wizard in the Tsang Plateau region of central Asia in 1913. I recalled that the publication in 1916 of his brochure The Zanthu Tablets: A Conjectural Translation, with its unholy and repulsive picture of the dawn age of civilization, had been thunderously condemned as “cosmic blasphemy" from press and pulpit, and had given the death-blow to his scientific reputation. Two years later he was committed to a madhouse; eight years after, he died raving.
We had a copy of the Zanthu Tablets in our library section, although I had never dared look within its innocuous green leatherette cover; I did so now, however, and quickly found the passage to which the handwritten note refers. It is close to the end of the ninth tablet—there are ten in all—and the relevant passage must be that in which the hierophant Zanthu invokes "the Father of Worms ... even undying and putrescent Ubb, leader and progenitor of the dreaded Yuggya—the loathly and prehuman servitors of (Ythogcha), who squirm and slither in the slime about His feet.”
But the central passage reads thusly: “The Yuggya serve my lord Ythogtha and His Brother, Zoth-Ommog, even as the Deep Ones serve Cthulhu and the Tcho-Tchos their lords, Zhar and Lloigor; and as the Flame-Creatures strive ever to free Cthulhu and the Serpentmen of Valusia sought to unchain their lord, Yig, so do the Yuggya tirelessly gnaw at the bonds that hold Ythogtha and Zoth-Ommog."
This reminded me of something in one of those lengthy and chaotic passages from the Necronomicon. I turned to those manuscripts and found the quotation—“Within the five-pointed Star carven of grey stone from ancient Mnar lies armor against witches and daemons, against the Deep Ones, the Dholes, the Yuggs, the Voormis, the Tcho-Tcho, the Abominable Mi-Go, the Shoggoths, the Valusians, and all such people and beings who serve the Great Old Ones and their Spawn.”
I put away the Copeland papers with a little shudder of disgust. The fascination this repulsive and chaotic mythology had begun to exert on my imagination was distinctly unhealthy: I had been sleeping badly these past several nights, and my dreams—nightmares really—I, who have not had nightmares since I was an adolescent!—my dreams (which never, upon waking, could I remember in detail, save that they were frightful) were filled with shadowy terrors that left me weak and shaken at dawn. It was time I forgot about poor mad Copeland and his horror gods and their slithering horde of worm-like worshipers, and turned my mind to sane and sunlit matters.
Shoving the papers away with a determined gesture, I reached for my pipe ... and found myself staring directly into the carved glare of gloating, icy menace some unknown genius had sculpted in that weirdly horrible idol from Zoth-Ommog’s waters.
NOTE by Arthur Wilcox Hodgkins: Up to this point Dr. Blaine's manuscript is neatly written, on consecutively numbered sheets of office stationery, and develops a chronological narrative that is logical and coherent, although it betrays a level of emotional uneasiness just beIow the narrative surface. However, at this point the neat, logical portion of the manuscript ends abruptly, and the hastily scrawled and clumsily scribbled pages which follow are in no particular order, and describe the rapid and frightful degeneration of his mind toward a final, shattering climax of mad ravings. I have attempted to sort the following fragments into some sort of order, based on internal evidence, but without much success.
(DREAM ONE)
Extraordinary and terrifying dream tonight—first one I can remember clearly enough to set down. Dim, moonlit vistas of stone city of Cyclopean architecture—titanic stone blocks graven with sprawling and monstrously uncouth glyphs—rows of immense pylons marching the length of flagstone-paved squares—ziggurats or angular pyramids with smoky flames at summits, like altar fires.
Hooded and robed shapes about the upmost tiers of one colossal pyramid, and the sound of rhythmic chanting—over and over, the same inexplicable phrase—woke suddenly, dripping with cold sweat, with the irresistible urge co write down what I had heard (which is why I am describing the dream). Probably utterly meaningless, bur here goes—
The phrase is: “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.”
(DREAM TWO?)
Tonight I returned again in my dreams to that Cyclopean stone city of monstrous angular pyramids and tall pylons, and to the vision of queer, squat, robed and hooded celebrants worshiping at some awful Rite ... the Moon seized my attention ... it was frightfully huge, and its shining face oddly unmarked by the many craters which pockmark its visage in our day ... it made me wonder (in my dream) if this was a vision of some remote, preCambrian era—just then a horrible flying Thing flashed across the silver face of the full Moon—ribbed, membranous wings and hideously elongated beak or proboscis—surely a living pteranodon of the remote Mesozoic skies!
(PERHAPS DREAM 5 OR 4)
—I am in an immense building of monolithic stone, the blocks perhaps sixty or seventy feet on a side ... it is a colossal hall, lined with monstrous huge columns, like the hypostyle hall at Karnak ... and like the colonnades of Karnak, the pillars are covered with weird ideographs in some unknown, surely not human, language.