The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack: Anthology Part 26

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched-vainly, as it proved-for some portable souvenir to bear away.

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilc.o.x would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding-that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal-and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great lintel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced.

Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered s...o...b..ringly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described-there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. G.o.d! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilc.o.x raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky sp.a.w.n of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. G.o.d rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn't have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated, floundering at the edge of the water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the sh.o.r.e; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel sh.o.r.e that was not of earth the t.i.tan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the st.u.r.dy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where-G.o.d in heaven!-the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-sp.a.w.n was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comets tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder G.o.ds and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.

Out of that dream came rescue-the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell-they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.

That was the doc.u.ment I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine-this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.

Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come-but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this ma.n.u.script, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.

THE OLD ONE.

by John Glasby.

That there are still many mysteries a.s.sociated with this planet and, in particular how and when life first came into existence, is something no self-respecting scientist will deny. Geologists accept that the Earth is some four billion years old while archaeologists maintain that modern Man evolved only ten or fifteen thousand years ago. But suggest to them that Man is only the latest in a long line of intelligent races to have inhabited this planet and they either turn a deaf ear to such theories or verbally attack the proposer of such ideas, labeling him a crank or a fanciful dreamer.

They state categorically that there is not a single shred of evidence for such wild propositions; that no archaeological expedition has yet uncovered the ruins of such civilizations and if questioned about the ancient myths and legends of the old G.o.ds and the days when giants lived in the earth, they claim these are nothing more than superst.i.tious tales and old religions perpetrated by the priestly cults to gain power for themselves.

In my post as a.s.sociate professor of archaeology at a small American university I had come up against this brick wall of strict scientific agnosticism from many of my colleagues, in particular Professor Dorman, my immediate superior. Where matters of a bizarre or highly controversial nature were concerned, he absolutely refused to discuss them, insisting that his students must be taught only conventional theories and if I held any other ideas it would be best if I kept them to myself.

Being only a relatively obscure figure in archaeology, I did as I was bid during working hours. But after the lectures were finished, and during my weekends away from the university, I actively pursued my own ideas, haunting the various bookshops and libraries in my search for any reference to these most ancient of civilizations. My main purpose at that time was to extend my knowledge of these distant cultures as far back into Earth's prehistoric history as possible.

I read avidly of the religious beliefs of the early Egyptian dynasties and those of neighboring Ur and of the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans' discoveries on Crete, which resulted in rescuing the Minoan civilization from mythological fiction and putting it before the scientific world as fact.

Yet in spite of all my researches, I seemed doomed to go so far back in time and no further. There were, of course, the numerous references to fabled Atlantis but these were so varied and placed this civilization in so many different locations they were virtually useless.

Then, one October evening, I came across a bookshop I had not previously visited. It was in a narrow street well removed from any of the major thoroughfares and the dim-lit window did little to attract attention. I entered it with a curious sense of precognitive excitement, noticing that it appeared far more s.p.a.cious than I would have expected, viewing it from outside. There were a few late-night customers browsing among the shelves but most appeared interested in the sections devoted to modern novels and I soon found myself at the rear of the shop where the dusty appearance of the books was indicative both of their age and infrequent sale.

The majority dealt with mundane subjects such as geography and travel. There were one or two containing experiments in alchemy with vague references to the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life. These I glanced through and then replaced and I was beginning to despair of finding anything worthwhile when I spotted a slim volume tucked away, almost out of sight, behind a large treatise on the life of Samuel Pepys.

What initially caught my attention was the curious nature of the covers and binding. The covers had a smooth, slippery touch, more like metal than cloth or board and the pages were bound by incredibly thin strips of a dull grey metal. It looked like a fake made by some modern process cunningly treated to give the appearance of great age. Yet even in the dim light, I would have sworn that the pages were of some kind of papyrus, yellowed and brittle. Many of them were oddly stained as if by seawater and in places they were stuck together.

The text was handwritten and this, coupled with the fact that the ink had faded, made it singularly difficult to read. It was in Latin but that, in itself, presented to problem for I was well versed in that dead language. Almost at once, my eye fell upon a curious pa.s.sage- It is written in the Book of K'yog that long aeons before the first men came there was a great city built where the rivers Karnodir and Deb ran together at the head a delta which vanished in fire and cataclysm more than thirty thousand years ago. It is further told that the beings which erected the gray-hued pillars and columns of Yuth migrated from a dark planet on the outer edge of the solar system, drifting sunward on huge leathery wings and bearing with them an amorphous ent.i.ty they called Tsathoggua which they enshrined within a central temple and worshipped with abominable ceremonies each night when the moon was full.

To say that my excitement and curiosity reached fever pitch on reading this extraordinary pa.s.sage would be an understatement. This volume promised to provide me with such revelations into the distant past of our planet as I had never before encountered. There remained, of course, the possibility the book was a deliberate fake. Yet, somehow, I did not think so. There was something about it, some strange aura, which spoke of a long forgotten age. That the text had been copied from some much earlier volume, I did not doubt.

But if it provided me with but a single clue to further reading, it would be well worth whatever price the owner asked. I took it back to the front of the shop and handed it over the counter, asking him the price. He quoted a ridiculously low figure that I accepted at once and before leaving with my prize I inquired of him where he had obtained it.

I had noticed his curious expression the moment he had glanced at it and, although he raised no objection to my purchasing it, he seemed singularly evasive as to its origin. Finally, however, he consulted a large ledger, running his finger down the pages until he found the entry he sought.

The volume, he informed me, was part of a small lot he had bought some seven years earlier from a house in Winson Street when the owner, a recluse well into his nineties, had died leaving the house and contents to his grandson, a wealthy industrialist, who had not the slightest interest in such fantastic literature. On further questioning, he gave me, albeit reluctantly, the name and present address of this grandson.

The hour was now growing late and I hurried back to my rooms at the university, clutching my find under my coat for it had begun to rain and I did not wish any further damage to befall the book which, from my brief perusal, I felt certain was more than a thousand years old. I had already resolved to get in touch with Simon Howarth, the grandson, as soon as possible to see if he could possibly throw any light upon where his grandfather had obtained the volume.

That very evening, I sat until the early hours of the morning, reading through the book. Strangely, it bore no t.i.tle, nor was there any indication of the author, which was highly unusual. The only conclusion I could reach was that the writer, whoever he was, had penned these pages anonymously for fear of persecution. Down through the ages, those who had delved into such forbidden writings were considered warlocks and witches and had suffered a harsh fate at the hands of the Church.

Despite the numerous portions that had faded beyond legibility where I could make out only disjointed sentences, there was much in the book to convince me of its authenticity. There were, of course, no dates given which I could use to correlate with known historical facts and events, for it told of an era long before the primitive nomadic tribes of the Egyptian delta had come together after the war between North and South under the double crown of a united Egypt.

Briefly, it was a compilation of historical events covering a period, if I could read the text correctly, of more than fifty thousand years and ending some twenty thousands years ago, between the coming of this alien race to Earth from the Dark Planet on the rim of the solar system-which I a.s.sumed to be Pluto-to the destruction of their capital city of Yuth.

There were also veiled, and necessarily vague, references which went back in time much further than this, possibly millions of years, detailing a great war between two races fought far out in s.p.a.ce among the stars. For the first time I had come across evidence which went far beyond even my ideas upon this subject, alluding to beings far different from humans in their ability to move through s.p.a.ce and time quite freely, employing weapons beyond all imagining, able to produce living creatures from inanimate matter and energy, keeping them as slaves to perform all manner of menial tasks requiring only brute strength and little intelligence.

The outcome of this great interstellar war was defeat for the race, which the unknown writer called the Old Ones and they had been hurled down onto young, evolving planets of a number of suns, including our own. Here, they had been held in check throughout the ages by powerful spells and sigils of immense potency.

It made fascinating reading. But it ended on a chilling and menacing note which sent a shudder of nameless dread through me as I sat at my table; for it suggested that with the pa.s.sage of untold aeons, the potency of these ancient spells might weaken sufficiently for the Old Ones to throw off their shackles and rise again with terrible consequences for the inhabitants of those planets where they had been held in bondage.

I considered showing the volume to Professor Dorman but knowing his deep aversion to such bizarre ideas, I decided against such a course, at least for the present. He would undoubtedly have judged the book a very clever fake and ridiculed me for even thinking it could be genuine.

The following day was a Sat.u.r.day and, having no lectures, I had plenty of time to check the town map for the address before ringing Simon Haworth and arranging an appointment to see him on a matter which I described as particularly urgent.

He was a tall, bearded man in his late forties who received me cordially and evinced some surprise to learn that I had purchased one of the old books which had belonged to his grandfather. He himself had considered them to be worthless and had been glad to get rid of them when his grandfather's house had been emptied some ten years earlier.

I explained who I was and my interest in what had been written in the book; that my main purpose in visiting him was to inquire if he could give me any information at all on where his grandfather had obtained the book in question.

"Well now, Professor Sheldon," he said, shaking his head slowly, "I'm afraid there's very little I can tell you. My grandfather was a strange man with more than a pa.s.sing interest in this incredible mythos of alien races which existed on Earth long before men."

"The volume speaks of the Book of K'yog," I said. "Obviously this was the original source from which this book was copied."

Howarth's face showed he had never heard of the Book of K'yog, a fact which did not surprise me. But his next statement roused my curiosity.

"I do recall he had some correspondence with several people who had similar ideas to his own many years ago. Much of it came from abroad, remote parts of Asia and Africa."

I sat up straight in my chair. "I don't suppose any of these letters are still in existence?"

Howarth pursed his lips. "I'm not certain." He got to his feet. "There is an old casket of his containing some letters which I brought with me from the house."

"May I see it?" I asked.

Howarth hesitated for a moment, then went out of the room and I heard him going upstairs. He came back a few minutes later carrying an antique oak box, which he placed on the table in front of him. The lid, which was delicately carved with scrolls and minute figures was evidently locked but neither of us were able to find any keyhole.

Haworth gave a shaky laugh. "It doesn't seem as though he meant it to be opened." he muttered, turning it over and over in his hands, "Unless there's a concealed spring catch somewhere."

He moved his fingers over the curious arabesques carved on the lid and sides, then uttered a sharp exclamation as his finger depressed one and the lid flew open with a sudden snap.

Inside, bound with a length of black ribbon, was a bundle of letters, yellow with age. With Haworth's permission, I removed them and glanced at the dates. All were more than fifty years old and had come from many parts of the world, some written in hasty scribbles which were difficult to decipher; others in more stylish hands with flowing letters.

Haworth readily agreed I could take them with me to examine at my leisure and after promising to return them at the earliest opportunity, I left. Back at the university, I lost no time in reading through the curious correspondence Jethro Haworth had carried on more than fifty years before.

That he had believed implicitly in these fabulously ancient myths and legends was immediately apparent and his interest clearly stemmed from a very early age for two of the letters dated from the early years of the century when he could have barely entered his teens.

One, dated January 27, 1935, had been posted in Nairobi and contained the following cryptic pa.s.sage- Brenton claims we have now uncovered virtually all of the ruins, which certainly cover a very large extent. We are all agreed that this previously unsuspected city in the middle of the African continent is incredibly old. Allen maintains it to be contemporary with Ur while I am positive that not only is it far older but we have merely uncovered the topmost layers and will discover even more if we dig deeper. However, the buildings are far too regular, too normal, for it to be Yuth as mentioned in the Book of K'yog.

Many of the other letters were in a similar vein giving accounts of excavations in various regions of the world, but all from places where no known civilizations were believed to have existed in far-off days.

All mentioned Yuth, that gray city of this alien race which had disappeared twenty thousand years ago, millenia before the stones for the pyramids had been hewn from the earth. That they were all searching for it was self-evident. But why had nothing of this got into the newspapers or scientific journals of the time? While I would almost certainly have missed the former, it was unlikely I would have overlooked any reference in the latter. It took planning and finance to embark upon expeditions such as these to remote and generally inaccessible parts of the world.

The more I read of the letters, the more I became convinced that there was something distinctly odd about these excavations which were widely spread in both s.p.a.ce and time. It was almost as if there existed a cult dedicated to the discovery of Yuth and one which had gone to great pains to keep its activities well hidden from both the scientific community and the world at large.

There was one mysterious and portentous letter that was among the last Jethro Haworth had received before his death. It bore neither address nor signature but it yielded a cryptic clue to what I was seeking. Since it had a direct bearing upon subsequent events, I feel I should give it in full- Dear Haworth:- My physicians have told me I do not have much longer to live and I am therefore sending you the book that I promised you several years ago. Keep it well for as far as I am aware, there is no other copy in existence and should it be lost or destroyed, no means of recopying its contents.

As you are doubtless aware, all efforts to locate the aeon-old city of Yuth have been doomed to failure for the Book of K'yog has been lost for countless millenia and the cataclysmic events which annihilated Yuth, coupled with the geological upheavals which have altered the Earth's surface since that time, mean that it may never be found.

However, all may not necessarily be lost. I have recently read that certain underwater discoveries have been made off the Bimini Islands, which form part of the Bahamas. There is a road constructed of huge stone blocks and my own re-a.s.sessment of the various legends indicate that it is just possible Yuth lies there, submerged beneath the ocean for there are a number of scientific facts to support one of two theories. Firstly that a large meteor shower struck the region off the Carolina coast some fifteen thousand years ago as witnessed by the numerous craters which have been found there and secondly, that the rapid melting of the Laurentide ice-sheet twelve thousand years ago utterly inundated the area around the Bahamas.

Your sincere friend, Marcus Goravius.

I replaced the mystic letters in the box and carefully closed the lid. There the matter may have ended for there seemed no other avenues of research I could explore regarding this fantastic race of long-forgotten aeons. But events were soon to transpire which were to lead me into a realm of cosmic horror that transcended anything I had ever imagined and result in the horrific death of Professor Dorman.

The sequence of events began some three weeks later when it was announced that the university had been chosen to mount a small-scale archaeological expedition and one of the three suggested sites, one was Bimini.

Of the other two, one was a site in the middle of the Brazilian jungle and the third among the foothills of the Andes. Dorman and I discussed the alternatives at great length and, although leaving him ignorant of my true motives, I was finally able to persuade him that the Bimini site was the most logical since it was readily accessible, still posed several unsolved questions of archaeological importance in spite of the work which had already been carried out there, and would require less financing than the other two.

Since we were not due to start out for another four months we were able to ensure that our preparations were extremely thorough. The team was to consist of Dorman, two senior members of the Archaeology Department, Conlon and Brown, and myself. Two ships were put at our disposal, one carrying a bathysphere with all its ancillary equipment. We also made arrangements for a light aircraft to be based on the island so that aerial photographs might be taken of the various submerged artifacts, which were known to lie in the shallow waters off the island. Any divers we might need could readily be hired for the purpose once we arrived.

We flew down to Miami at the beginning of April where we joined the ship that was to take us the fifty miles or so to North Bimini. The second vessel had gone ahead and was anch.o.r.ed in the lagoon on the opposite side of the island to Paradise point, northwest of which lay what had come to be known as the Bimini Road, an underwater structure of regular and polygonal stones.

We finally arrived after a pleasant and uneventful crossing and caught our first sight of the islands in brilliant sunshine, going ash.o.r.e at the small settlement of Bailey Town.

In view of my unspoken knowledge concerning an alien race that had existed on Earth thousands of years prior to the advent of man on this planet, I was anxious to begin work at once. But Dorman vetoed such a plan, insisting it was essential we did not waste our efforts by mistakenly repeating earlier work. It was not, he maintained, as if we had discovered a completely new archaeological site where we could excavate almost anywhere in the hope of making new and important finds.

With this I had to be content for I could see the wisdom in what he said. Accordingly, the first couple of days were spent in getting all of the gear ready and surveying the maps of the undersea discoveries already made. We knew that carbon dating had already been done on that plant and animal life found in the blocks of stone, which made up the Bimini Road. These indicated these remains to be between six and twelve thousand years old although the age of the huge stones themselves was probably much older than this since they were being constantly re-crystallized due to the high mineral content of the water itself.

It was finally agreed that we would begin our examination of the ocean bed considerably further from the island than had hitherto been possible, using the bathysphere. This was of the most modern design, capable of withstanding tremendous pressures and equipped, not only with a battery of powerful searchlights but also scoops and grabs for retrieving objects from the floor of the sea, all manipulated from inside. The sphere was also large enough for two men to be seated in comfort and messages and instructions could be relayed to the surface by means of a radio-telephone link. Three exterior cameras, one using infrared film completed the battery of scientific instruments.

On the morning of the third day we went out to the waiting vessel and headed north until we reached a point some thirty miles from Bimini. It had already been agreed that Conlon and I should make the first descent and it was with a feeling of mounting excitement and trepidation that I followed Conlon into the confined s.p.a.ce of the bathysphere and seated myself in front of the bank of instruments.

The hatch was closed and made secure before we were lifted from the deck and lowered over the side. A few moments later we hit the water and began the descent into the blue-green world that gradually became darker as we went down. I must confess I was the more nervous for I could not help recalling that apocryphal letter addressed to Jethro Haworth shortly before his death and I was oddly afraid of what we might see in the beams of the searchlights once we approached the bottom. Was it possible that the site of legendary Yuth lay directly below us? And if so, what alien wonders lay beneath the mud and ooze of the seabed, hidden from sight for untold thousands of years?

The mere thought of finding this long-lost city filled me with a chill that not even the warmth inside the bathysphere could erase. I attempted to put the notion out of my mind by concentrating on the task that lay ahead of us. Conlon switched on the lights and we were both surprised by the sheer clarity of the water. All around us were shoals of multi-colored fish and long green streamers of sea gra.s.s.

The ocean at this point was some forty feet in depth for we were very close to the sandy shelf and Conlon was the first to spot the bottom, a smoothly undulating plain covered with strange markings and long waving strands of seaweed. We were then about ten feet above the bottom and I called the ship to move very slowly ahead while my companion began filming. Here and there, we noticed curious regularities just visible in the sand-edges of almost perfect cubes poking up from the ocean floor where the currents had swept away some of the clinging mud.

We were now progressing slowly northward and below us the shelf was falling away into greater depths. More of the oddly-shaped objects now became visible and it became clear that the surging currents had swept much of the overlying sand and silt away, depositing it over the lip of the shelf which we knew lay less than a quarter of mile away. I seemed to see patterns and configurations in those half-concealed blocks which suggested artificiality which grew more and more p.r.o.nounced the further we went over that fantastic seabed.

I mentioned some of this to Conlon but he was far more cautious and conservative in his outlook, believing them to be nothing more than natural limestone blocks, which had been split by nature into such seemingly regular features. That this could happen and was, indeed, a well-known phenomenon did little to lessen my growing apprehension.

A few minutes later, when the beam from one of the searchlights picked out a tall monolith thrusting from the sand, encrusted with sh.e.l.ls and festooned with seaweed, I felt certain there were odd carvings visible on the surface but Conlon merely laughed at my suggestion, saying that my eyes were playing tricks with me and making me imagine things that were not there.

All this time, we had been in constant touch with the vessel and now we asked that we should continue northward until we reached the much deeper water so that we might glimpse whatever lay at much deeper levels. So far, we had come across nothing sufficiently interesting to attempt to bring to the surface.

Dorman was, at first, reluctant to agree but permission was eventually given and we began to drift more rapidly northward. Ahead of us, the ocean floor sloped downward at an increasing angle and the general topography of the undersea terrain became more strange so that Conlon was forced to admit there was something not quite right in the way odd protrusions a.s.sumed domelike shapes with the hint of shattered pillars and marble columns lying at angles all around them. Curiously, I felt more at ease on seeing these artefacts which spoke of them being manmade rather than natural fabrications for if, as they suggested, they were of marble, gleaming whitely in the light, they formed no part of the alien, gray city of Yuth.

Here and there were isolated time-shattered columns and we decided that, once we had taken a look beyond the limestone shelf, we would pick up one of these objects and take it to the surface where we could examine it at our leisure.

Less than five minutes later a long, almost straight line of darkness appeared directly in front of us, stretching away in an unbroken line in both directions. We knew immediately what it was we were seeing the edge of the shallows around the islands. Beyond, lay the dark abyss whose depths we did not know.

I think we both held our breaths, sitting forward in our seats, as we stared through the toughened gla.s.s of the porthole, straining our vision to make out details in the single beam that shone downward. The light touched the edge of the shelf and then we had crossed over it and only an inky blackness confronted us. There was now a much more powerful current tugging at the bathysphere, pushing it forward on the cable and for a while we found ourselves swinging helplessly like a pendulum, unable to control our movements.

After a while the swinging ceased and with the motion of the bathysphere stabilized we were able to give the signal for the metal sphere to be lowered. To one side of us, the looming rock wall ascended slowly with vague outcroppings, which showed eerily in the light. Despite the slowness of our descent into the gloom, we were unable to discern much detail although there was no doubt that at some time in the far past, t.i.tanic convulsions had taken place here.

Below us, the blackness was absolute, the beam penetrating it for only a little way in stark contrast to the clarity of the water above the shallow shelf.

Then, almost before we were aware of it, we caught a fragmentary glimpse of something that rose from those benighted depths, clawing up from the unseen floor. My initial impression was of a jagged line of cones, s.p.a.ced out at irregular intervals; thick, blunted needles of some curious rock formation, which evidently covered a wide area.

To me, they held ineffable suggestions of a blasphemous structural architecture unlike anything I had ever seen. Conlon and I gazed at them in awe as we drifted slowly above them, striving to imbue them with some form of normality. How high they loomed above the ocean floor it was impossible even to guess, for the searchlight beam only touched their topmost regions. But even this was enough to show the sheer alieness of their general outlines. Had they been mere conical towers, it would not have offended our sense of perspective to such a degree. But there were bulbous appendages and truncated cones, which intermeshed in angles bearing no relation to Euclidean geometry and I felt my eyes twist horribly as I tried vainly to take in everything I saw.

That Conlon was similarly affected, I saw at once. His hands were white-knuckled on the controls in front of him and his features bore an expression of mingled awe and surprise.

"What is it?" he asked finally. "Atlantis?"

I managed to shake my head. "Not Atlantis." I said. "Those ruins are far older and too alien to be Atlantis."

"Then what?"

"Yuth, perhaps." I said in a hushed voice although I could tell by the look on his face that he had never heard the name.

I did not elaborate because we were now too engrossed in checking the three cameras and watching the unfolding of the awesome scene below us. I could not help feeling there was something evil about those nightmarishly misshapen spires and pinnacles with their bizarre curves and planes; and yet it was not an evil a.s.sociated with Earth but rather with endless gulfs of s.p.a.ce and time, with dimensions other than those we know.

The majority were smashed and broken with harsh, gaping orifices showing blackly against the sickly gray. Certainly no hand of man had erected them and carved their cruel, hideous contours. Despite his sense of awe, Conlon wished to descend deeper, to determine the height of the buildings and what lay beneath but I hastily overruled him. The obscure quality of menace in their weird symbolism made me shudder and long for the sanity and safety of the ship.

Accordingly, I gave the order to raise the bathysphere and bring us back over the shelf where we soon succeeded in lifting one of the marble columns from the mud where it had lain for countless centuries.

Back on board the vessel we supervised the unloading of the pillar and the films from the cameras. While Brown developed the latter, Dorman, Conlon and I examined the remains of the pillar that bore curious resemblances to the cla.s.sical early Greek style. Indeed, many of the fluted carvings were almost identical to those seen in the Athenian ruins. But the material from which it had been fashioned was a mystery. Certainly it was unlike any other form of marble known to us and as to the quarry from whence it had originally come, none of us could hazard a guess.

It was when we came to describe what we had seen in the much deeper water off the shelf, however, that Dorman evinced scepticism. While he was quite prepared to believe that some civilization had existed at this spot perhaps four thousand years ago, he could not accept that the curious structures we had seen later were anything but natural rock formations probably thrust up from the seabed by minor volcanic activity during some past geological age.

Even after the films had been developed and we watched them in a darkened room, he refused to alter his opinion. There was no doubt that seeing them as mere flickering shadows on a white screen, in the relative comfort of the room, they lost some of their air of menace and mystery and it was possible to attach any explanation one wished to their nature and origin. Even Conlon appeared swayed by Dorman's persuasive arguments, agreeing that vulcanism could produce weird and wonderfully shaped forms, particularly when it occurred underwater when there were both pressure and cooling effects to be taken into account.