The Call of Cthulhu
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CHAPTER I. Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival, a survival of a hugely remote period when consciousness was manifested perhaps in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity, forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. Aldrin on Blackwood. CHAPTER I. The horror and clay. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by bland optimism, but it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dead glimpses of truth flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things, in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out. Certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link and so hideous a chain, I think that the professor too intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him. My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death of my great uncle George Gamel Angel, professor emeritus of Semitic languages at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angel was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums so that his passing at the age of 92 may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat, falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a shortcut from the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder but concluded after a perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a