2 clays later.
Into the nameless mountains at last, trudging forward alone, dragging my supplies and records behind me on improvised sledge. ... Two more encounters with the winged lizard-things since that first, shocking scene; each time, they fled blundering and squealing from the very sight of me (perhaps I am the first white man they have ever seen?)—Shot one of them, but didn't succeed in killing it. God forgive me, I had drink its slimy, nauseous, stinking blood, no snow at this height ... hallucinations virtually continuous now, night and day, almost at the end of my strength—queer architectural effects along the skyline clearly visible, though I am half-blind from cold and dryness of the air, so only blurred glimpses of geometrical stone cube sections clinging to the heights above me, worn and weathered as if hundreds or thousands of millions of years had gone by since unthinkable hands first reared them. ... Down into the gullies and ravines amid the foothills now. ... Stone outcroppings unbelievable, Azoic, I swear it! Most horrible ancient piece of continuously exposed land surface on this planet ...
If genuine ruins, works of sentience, then these terraced cyclopean walls and fortifications that seem to throng about the fang-sharp, frightful peaks are, must be, the oldest worked stone artifacts known to science ... older by innumerable ages than dark Lhasa or the labyrinthine ruined cities on Ponape ... surely, survivals of immemorial Mu or of something older even than Mu—titanic glyphs, or suggestions of glyphs, along the stretch of the terraced battlements, uncannily suggestive of the uncouth R'lyehian characters found in Alhazred and von Junzt. ... I am going on somehow; God help me, there is no going back now. ...
Later.
... Must be very near the location of the Zanthu tomb by this time—curse the black day I ever dared peer within the shockingly suggestive pages of the Ponape Scripture they keep hidden away in the archives of the Kester Library, and found the clue that put me on the track of the wizard's tomb and the trove of inscribed tablets supposedly buried with him, rumored to contain frightful lore from the Elder Records. ... If any eye but mine should ever peruse these scribbled pages, listen to me: some things we were not meant to discover. ...
Later (same day).
Have been thinking about those grim, unholy revelations hinted at in Alhazred: I tell you, the old Arab knew, damn him! ... Trudging on through this black realm of icy shadow and whistling wind and horribly ancient rock ... there are incredible survivals that would blast the mind of men, if confronted face to fate, and grisly cults linger in these forgotten regions, whereof the grim Chaugnar-worshipers poor Richardson found are the least frightful (doesn’t Alhazred himself whisper of a corpse-eating cult somewhere in Leng?) ... flaming skies, and Something hidden away behind a wall of black mountains that march across the north like the ramparts of some fantastic, sky-tall barrier built by the Elder Gods to hide and hold prisoned an unthinkable terror ... what gigantic Secret have these frozen hills kept hidden for five hundred million years? The shadowy aura of some tremendous revelation of mind-withering magnitude haunts my feverish and disordered brain—some horrible and unguessed-at Truth which men were never meant to know. ...
—Food gone; crawling forward on hands and knees now; I can suck moisture from the unpolluted snow, thank God, bur nothing to eat ... chewing on the leather straps of the sledge ... if only I could shoot another of those crustacean-things, but the faceless, squealing monstrosities avoid coming near, although they linger on the fortified heights ... I would do more this time than merely drink its filthy blood.
Much later.
I have found the necropolis in a narrow, mountain-walled valley. It is older than the foundation stones of Ur, or the eldermost of the pyramids. Atlantis was not uprisen from the steaming seas when these low, crude, flat-roofed stone tombs were built ... no living thing can have been here for unguessed millennia, but I do not like those nine-clawed pawprints in the age-old snows ... deep-cut, enormous glyphs above the sunken doorway to each comb in Naacal, Tsath-yo, and R’lyehian; if the wizard lies in this burying-ground, I will find him. ... What do you suppose it was that he did, that made the Ponape Scripture curse his name so dreadfully? What unthinkable cosmic blasphemy did he perpetrate, that made Them come down from Glyu-Vho, to drown all of primordial Mu beneath the boiling waves? ... (Later.) I have found the tomb, his name deeply but hastily scratched in the old weathered stone above the crumbling lintel—Iä! Cthulhu! Give me the strength to somehow force the stone slab of the door .... I have crawled inside; nothing but blackness and stale, vitiated air ... can hear nothing, not even the wind nor that accursed and constant howling from the heights ... the sepulcher itself is rectangular and very heavy, with a stone lid that seems to weigh a ton. ... I do not care for the inscription cut around the edges of the lid, and avert my eyes hastily from the Name writ there in warning. ... Ah! the lid is off at last. ... I must pause to rest, must conserve my strength ... very weak; heart laboring ... now, shine the flashlight within—there! Ten black jade tablets, narrowly incised with row upon row of tiny characters that resemble hieratic Naacal ... skeletal hands clutch them to the bony rib cage of the mummified thing .... I must shine the light around to see if Zanthu bore to his grave Other artifacts or talismans of interest to Science—
Oh, God. God. Why did it all seem so horribly familiar to me? I should never have tried to come this far ... “some things we were not meant to discover!" Almost, I could laugh at my own words, now. ... The wind outside is horribly cold, the howling shrill in my ears ... clutch the stone tablets to my breast, icy chill against the flesh under my furs ... our into the hills again, to the desolate sands of the plateau beyond. ... I will die here in the lonely places of Tsang, I think, but not in that shunned valley of prehistoric tombs, not there! ... God, let me shut it out of my mind ... let me forget the unforgettable ... THAT FACE! ... that awful moment of shattering revelation ... the light of my torch shining upward, past withered bony thorax a-dangle with leathery shreds of dried and ancient flesh ... that skull, whereon the flesh had dried, but the features were still recognizable ... how my horrified shrieks rang and rang and died in shuddering echoes in that closed stone room ... I am quite mad ... my brain throbs and burns ... slogging on, the dead crystals of sand whispering about my heavy boots ... but who could blame me? How could I have known? ... “some things we were not meant co discover" ... O, God, the mummy's face ... O, God, O, God, O, God, I should have guessed. For the face was my own.
HERE is another translation from the shocking Zanthu Tablets, one of Lin's own contributions to the Mythos. They seem intended as a Muvian counterpart co Lovecraft’s Lomarian Pnakotic Manuscripts and Richaid F. Searight’s Eltdown Shards. In the early notes tor these stories Lin had envisioned two tales, "The Tablets from the Tomb" and "The Thing in the Pit." The first would have read much like the present version of "The Thing in the Pit", save that it would have ended with Zanthu fleeing the destruction he had unwittingly unleashed, hoping to make it to Leng or Shamballah. The single premise of the story, the priestling’s attempt to vindicate his patron deity against the tyrannical cult of Ghatanothoa, is lifted bodily from Lovecraft’s "Out of the Aeons", specifically the subnarrative of the doomed attempt of T'yog to invade the sanctuary of Ghatanothoa.