The figurine itself is a most unusual artifact, quite unlike any other sculpture of native workmanship ever found in the Pacific area. It stands nearly nineteen inches high and is exquisitely carved of glossy, highly polished jade of an unfamiliar type not yet identified. The stone itself is a greasy, grayish-white, mottled with irregular patches of dark green, and it is harder and more dense than any other known variety of jade.
The artistry of the carving is surprisingly sophisticated for a region whose sculptural attainments seldom rise above crude, geometrical bas-reliefs and rough, anthropomorphic idol-making. As Dr. Blaine’s notes on the figurine remark, it is “not only non-humanoid, but virtually non-objective—hauntingly suggestive of some of the weird carven figures of the little-known amateur sculptor, Clark Ashton Smith—and in detail and finish, to say nothing of conception, ... weirdly reminiscent of the brilliant if degenerate work produced by the famed San Francisco sculptor, Cyprian Sincaul.” Dr. Blaine’s notes on the figurine are succinct and well phrased to the point where I can hardly hope to improve upon them, so I shall simply quote them directly:
“It represents a peculiar creature with a body shaped like a broadbased, truncated cone. A flat, blunt, wedge-shaped, vaguely reptilian head surmounts this conical torso, and the head is almost entirely hidden behind swirling tresses. This hair, or beard and mane, consists of thickly carved and coiling ropes, like serpents or worms, and the workmanship is so uncannily naturalistic that you could almost swear the slithering tendrils are in motion. Through this repulsive Medusa-mane of ropy tendrils, two fierce, serpent-like eyes glare in a horrible mingling of cold, inhuman mockery and what I can only describe as gloating menace. ... The base upon which this truncated, conical body rests is carved from the same unfamiliar speckled jade, and it is oddly angled, as if the sculptor’s culture possessed a completely non-Euclidean geometry. Deeply and cleanly cut in one side of this odd-angled base are two exceedingly complex hieroglyphs in no language known to me, symbols which bear no similarity to either Chinese ideographs, Egyptian glyphs, Arabic characters. Sanskrit, or even common forms of Mesopotamian cuneiform, and certainly no slightest resemblance to any Southern or Central Pacific native writing known to me.”
Dr. Blaine’s notes on the Ponape figurine conclude thusly: “Rising from overlapping folds at the base of the image’s neck, four bluntly tapering limbs or appendages rise. ... They are flat and resemble the arms of the common echinoderm of the class asteroidea—the familiar starfish of our California beaches—with the rather peculiar exception that the underside of these broad, flat, narrowing limbs bear row upon row of disc-like suckers ... the unknown artist has combined suggestions of starfish and squid or octopi in his central conception.”
Dr. Blaine's description is admirably scientific, but what he cannot suggest is the curiously horrible sensation of distinct unease the observer feels when he looks upon the mysterious figurine. The sensation is quite literally horrible: Something in the cold, fixed, knowing glare of those reptilian eyes of carved, lustrous stone, and some uncanny hint of physical menace in the way the jade tentacles seem to lift and reach, as if striving to seize and entangle the helpless observer in their loathsome coils, is ... quite thoroughly unnerving, and has to be experienced to be believed.
Handling the stone thing was suddenly repugnant. The cold, slick, greasy surface was repellent to the touch, and the sluggish, leaden weight of it suddenly seemed overpoweringly unpleasant. I put the ugly thing down atop the safe and turned with an irrepressible shudder of uneasiness to a scrutiny of the notes.
i had abandoned my study of the file on the figurine the night before at the point at which Professor Copeland had inserted several lengthy and incomprehensible excerpts quoted from scholarly or mythological texts. I read these with intense curiosity, mingled, I must admit, with slight amusement and contempt, for the farrago of superstitious mumbo-jumbo sounded like the spewings of a mad brain. Nevertheless, remembering Blaine’s urgent warnings about the danger that lurked in the Ponape figurine, I must say I found a singularly ominous undertone pervading the excerpts.
The first item was a quotation copied from Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis. It ran as follows:
“Byatis, the serpent-bearded, the god of forgetfulness, came with the Great Old Ones from the stars, called by obeisances made to his image” this passage was heavily underscored, probably by Professor Copeland. It continued: "which was brought by the Deep Ones to Earth. He may be called by the touching of his image by a living being." That passage was underscored, as well. "His gaze brings darkness of the mind; and it is told that those who look upon his eye will be forced to walk into his clutches. He feasts upon those who stray to him, and from those upon whom he feasts he draws a part of their vitality, and so grows vaster. For there is this about those images of the Great Old Ones brought down from the stars when all the Earth was young, that a psychic link connects such as Byatis or Han to their images, and they that worship the Great Old Ones and who serve them on this plane may communicate with their Masters through such eidola: but a fate darkling and terrible beyond belief is reserved for they who unwittingly possess such idols from Beyond, for them the Old Ones drain of vitality through this psychic link, and their dreams are made hideous with nightmare glimpses of the Ultimate Pit."
The passage from Prinn’s book broke off there. I mused over it, and suddenly I recalled the long weeks Dr. Blaine hail studied the Ponape figurine, which Professor Copeland had believed an image of Zoth-Ommog, and how he had complained of bad dreams during those weeks of proximity to the figurine.
The next quotation was from a book called Revelations of Glaaki, or from a part of it, which Professor Copeland referred to as "the suppressed twelfth volume", whatever he meant by that cryptic remark. This second quotation, also, was a frenzied babbling of weird names and meaningless symbols, and it had much of the sinister nightmarish tone of certain volumes of the Biblical apocrypha. It went as follows, beginning apparently in the very middle of a sentence:
... so may Y’golonac return to walk among men and await that time when the earth is cleared off and Cthulhu rises from his tomb among the weeds, Glaaki thrusts open the crystal trapdoor, the brood of Eihort are born into daylight, Shub-Niggurath strides forth to smash the moon-lens. Byatis bursts forth from his prison. Daoloth tears away illusion to expose the reality concealed behind, Aphoom Zhah rises from the bowels of Yarak at the ultimate and boreal pole, Ghatanothoa emerges from his crypt beneath the mountain-top fortress of Yaddith-Gho in eldritch Mu, and Zoth-Ommog ascends from the ocean deeps, Iä! Nyarlathotep! By their very images shall ye conjure them.
The third of these excerpts was the most inexplicable of all; it had been taken from a book by the Comte d’Erlette, the Cultes des Goules and it went thusly: