IV.
THE trip was long and slow and time-consuming. I took a bus to Los Angeles and caught the cast-bound train there, changing trains in Denver and again in Chicago, and one last time in Boston, where I boarded a local for the last leg of my journey.
I had taken a private compartment all the way, and, thinking I would need something to read during the long trip, I had brought along in my briefcase Professor Copeland’s copy of the rare Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt. In abstracting this book from the Institute’s files, I suppose I was guilty of a technical irregularity, but it was hardly likely to be missed, as no one on the staff knew or cared to know what it was.
I examined the book with some curiosity. It was a big quarto, bound in dark leather with rust-eaten iron hasps. I had looked the book’s history up and had learned this was the original binding, and that only a half dozen known copies of this first edition are extant. Von Junzt, or, to give his full name, Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, had been born at Cologne in 1795, taught as a professor of Occultism and Metaphysics at the famous University of Wurttemberg, and died under singularly curious circumstances in Düsseldorf in 1839, just before his monumental book appeared in print for the first time. There was a cheap and faulty “pirated" edition published by Bridewell in 1815, and a heavily expurgated version in English appeared in 1909 from Golden Goblin Press in New York City.
I opened it at random; it was in German, of course, and the paper was in quite good condition considering that the volume was nearly a century old, although the pages were somewhat smudged and stained. As I flipped through the front matter my eye was caught by the name "Abdul Alhazred" on page ix. Alhazred, of course, was the Muslim demonologist whose chief claim to fame was his authoring of the Necronomicon; I read the passage which contained this reference to him, which began "es sieht zweifel, dass dieses Buch ist die Grundlage der Okkultelileratur", and was amused to see what von Junzt had to say about Alhazred’s reputed insanity, which was more than a trifle ironic in light of the fact that many of his learned colleagues of the time had thought von Junzt quite seriously deranged himself.
Before long I found myself thoroughly engrossed in the turgid prose of the great German occultist. His book discussed many weird and curious cults which survived in the remoter corners of the world, such as the Thuggee murder-cults of India and the Dacoits of Burma and the corpse-eating cult of further Thibet, but centrally the book concerned itself with a worldwide network of secret societies who served or worshiped the Great Old Ones. The opening part of this central section of the book was an essay of considerable length which traced the descent of the Old Ones from their mighty parents or progenitors (von Junzt remained ambiguous as to their sex) who were named Azathoth and Ubbo-Sathla, names I recollected had been mentioned in the Copeland notes. This essay, which ran to something like ninety pages of text, was called the "Narrative of the Elder World", and was partly a translation of the third book of the Livre d'ivon, a book written or translated by a 13th Century Norman-French scholar called Gaspard du Nord, and partly an annotation or exegesis of the third book, which von Junzt had put together by collating the Livre d'ivon text with comparable data given in the Latin Necronomicon. Although interminable, written in the long-winded style typical of classic Germanic scholarship, this account of the basic mythology contained a considerable amount of material that was new to me, and much that was not to be found in the Blaine/Copeland notes.
From my earlier study of the Copeland file on the Xothic material I already knew that the professor had long strove to obtain a copy of von Junzt’s famous (or perhaps infamous) tome. Now, as I delved deeper. I found that von Junzt’s book was invaluable to scholars of this mythology because, of all those who had studied or written upon this legend cycle, it was von Junzt alone who had had unlimited access to certain unthinkably old and fantastically rare mythological works which contained precious information on the details of the mythos not available to the later writers on this subject.
Among these exceedingly rare books was one known as the Pnakotic Manuscripts which, like the du Nord book, had never been printed and was circulated in manuscript only among the cultists. The Pnakotic Manuscripts was, however, unthinkably more ancient than the Livre d'ivon, or Book of Eibon as it is sometimes known. The traditional account of the origins of the Manuscripts (which von Junzt solemnly repeats without comment) claims that the earliest chapters were reputedly set down before the first forms of life had come into existence on this Earth, the authors supposedly a mysterious extraterrestrial race of mental entities from “Yith” who came to this planet long before the advent of human or even mammalian life, and who dwelt somewhere in primordial Australia in a cyclopean stone city known to subsequent races as "Pnakotus", a name which was believed to mean something in the nature of “The City of the Archives.” From this name, Pnakotus, obviously, the title Pnakotic Manuscripts was presumably derived.
Yet another sourcebook, even more terrifyingly ancient and alien, was believed to have been used by the German occultist—that dread chronicle, the Ghorl Nigräl, whose ultra-telluric origin is the secret of one of the most horrible of the dark myths locked within the dim pages of the Book of Eibon. There it is called The Book of Night, and it is told that the clawed, snouted, nonhuman wizard Zkauba, on a world called Yaddith of the Five Moons, thieved it from the monstrous Dholes. Von Junzt records of this Ghorl Nigräl that only one copy has ever been brought down to this planet from frightful Yaddith in all the immeasurable ages of Earth's existence in this part of space. This single copy is hidden somewhere in the black depths of Asia, at a place called Yian-Ho; there the book is whispered of in a thousand legends as “the hidden legacy of eon-old Leng." According to Gottfried Mülder, a scientist who accompanied von Junzt on his travels, and who contributed a foreword to the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, von Junzt was the only completely human entity who has been permitted to peruse this horribly ancient book whose origins, if truly given, are so alien as to stagger the imagination. To examine the Ghorl Nigräl, von Junzr had to venture to a remote, obscure, ill-reputed stone monastery somewhere in the interior of China, to which a train of yellow masked and robed and “oddly-misshapen” monks bore the precious codex from its secret hiding place for his perusal, in return for a certain price so repugnant and horrible that Mülder shudderingly refused to discuss it and went to his deathbed with the secret locked within him. This same Mülder, long alter the death of von Junzt, whereof such odd and frightful stories were whispered, wrote an attempted reconstruction of what he remembered von Junzt telling him about the contents of this mysterious book, using Mesmerism and something which sounds like self-hypnosis to obtain perfect recall. His book, The Secret Mysteries of Asia, with a Commentary on the Ghorl Nigräl, was published at Mülder’s own expense at Leipzig in 1847; copies are exceptionally rare, for the authorities seized and burned almost the entire printing, and Mülder himself narrowly escaped hanging by fleeing to Metzengerstein, where he died in a madhouse eleven years later.