by Colin Wilson
Before I had finished talking to the New York Times man, three more helicopters appeared. More journalists. By four o’clock, Reich had been persuaded to emerge from his tent, and was demonstrating the mechanism of the probe—with a bad grace. By six o’clock, we were both hoarse and weary. We escaped back to the hotel in Kadirli, and managed to eat a quiet supper. The manager had been told to refuse all telephone calls. But at nine o’clock, Fu’ad got through to us. He was waving a copy of the New York Times. The whole front page was devoted to the story of the ‘World’s Biggest Discovery Ever’. I was quoted as endorsing the theory that we had discovered the city of a race of giants. I was made to hint that these giants had also been magicians who had raised their thousand ton building blocks by some strange art that has now been forgotten. A well known colleague of mine gave his opinion that the pyramids of Egypt and ancient Peru could never have been built by any known method of engineering, and that this new discovery would surely prove it beyond all doubt. On the inside page of the newspaper, a popular writer on archaeology contributed an article called ‘The Giants of Atlantis’.
I assured Fu’ad that I had never said anything about giants—at least, not in the context quoted. He promised to ring the New York Times and correct their account. Then I crept off to Reich’s room to drink a final glass of brandy, leaving instructions that I was at home to no one—not even the Sultan of Turkey.
I think I have said enough to indicate why we were unable to return to the site for another week. The Turkish government supplied soldiers to guard our equipment; but they had no orders to keep visitors at bay, and the air above Karatepe swarmed with helicopters like wasps around jam. The hotels in Kadirli were jammed for the first time since they had been built. Reich and I had to stay in our rooms, or risk being accosted a hundred times an hour by cranks and sensation seekers. The Turkish government granted us the hovercraft within twelve hours, but it was impossible to use it. On the following day, the Carnegie Foundation granted us two million dollars for starting the tunnel, and the World Finance Committee produced another two million. Finally, the Turkish government agreed to build a forty foot wire enclosure around the Black Mountain, and they did this in less than a week, with some help from American and Russian Foundations. We were then able to return to work.
Inevitably, everything had changed. There were no more quiet siestas after lunch, or midnight talks in our tent. Soldiers stood guard all over the mound. Prominent archaeologists from every country in the world plagued us with questions and suggestions. The air buzzed with helicopters, which were prevented from landing by warning radio broadcasts from a hastily erected control tower—again a product of American and Russian co-operation.
Still, the compensations were considerable. A team of engineers harnessed the probe to the hovercraft, so that we could take instant readings over the most difficult terrain. The Turkish government provided us with two more moles, both specially reinforced. Money and equipment could be had for the asking—a situation to delight the heart of any archaeologist.
Within two days we had made a number of astonishing discoveries. First of all, the probe indicated that we had, in fact, discovered a buried city. Walls and building extended for over a mile in both directions. The Black Mountain of Karatepe appeared to be roughly above the centre of this city. And it was, indeed, a city of giants. The ‘Abhoth block’ was not a building or a religious monument; it was a single building block, cut from solid basalt, the hardest kind of volcanic basalt. One of the reinforced moles actually cut off a fragment of the block, and brought it to the surface.
Yet a curious bad luck followed us. Within forty-eight hours, we lost one of the reinforced moles in the same manner as the first. It ceased to respond to signals at a depth of two miles. A week later, we lost the other mole in the same manner—half a million pounds worth of equipment buried at the bottom of a sea of earth. A careless operator lost control of the hovercraft, and allowed the probe to crash into a hut full of Turkish soldiers, killing eighteen. The probe was undamaged, but the newspapers, which were still in full cry, were not slow to draw parallels with the misfortunes of the Carter-Carnarvon expedition of 1922, the sensational stories of the ‘curse of Tutankhamen’. A colleague, upon whose discretion I thought I could rely, reported my theory that the Hittites of Karatepe owed their survival to their reputations as magicians, and started a new wave of sensational stories.
It was at this point that the name of H.P. Lovecraft entered the story. Like the majority of my colleagues, I had never heard of Love-craft, the writer of supernatural stories who died in 1937. For a long time after his death, a small ‘Lovecraft cult’ had persisted in America, largely due to the advocacy of Lovecraft’s friend, the novelist August Derleth. It was Derleth who now wrote to Reich, pointing out that the name of ‘Abhoth the Unclean’ occurs in Lovecraft’s work, and that he figures as one of the ‘Great Old Ones’.
My first thought, when Reich showed me the letter, was that it was a hoax. We checked in a dictionary of literature, and discovered that Derleth was a well known American writer, now in his eighties. Lovecraft was not mentioned in the dictionary, but a call to the British Museum produced the information that he had also existed, and had written the books Derleth attributed to him.
There was a sentence in Derleth’s letter that struck me. After admitting that he could not explain how Lovecraft could have known about ‘Abhoth the Dark’—since the name does not occur in any of the Hittite documents that were uncovered before 1937—he added: ‘Lovecraft always attached great importance to dreams, and often told me that the subjects of many of his stories occurred to him in dreams’.
‘Another piece of evidence for your racial subconscious,’ I commented to Reich. He suggested that it was more probably coincidence. Abbaddon is the destroying angel of Hebrew legend; the ‘hoth’ ending is Egyptian. A god ‘Abaoth’ is mentioned in certain Babylonian writings that Lovecraft might have seen. As to the ‘great old ones’, the phrase is not so strange that it might not have occurred to a writer of supernatural fiction. ‘Why drag in the racial subconscious? ’ said Reich, and I was inclined to agree with him.
A few days later, we changed our minds. The parcel of books sent by Derleth finally arrived. I opened a story called ‘The Shadow out of Time’—and immediately came upon a description of immense stone blocks buried beneath the desert of Australia. At the same moment, Reich, who was sitting in the other armchair, gave an exclamation, and read aloud the sentence: ‘The dweller in darkness is also known by the name Nyogtha’. Only the evening before, we had arrived at a tentative translation of the inscription on the Abhoth block: ‘And the horses shall be brought two by two into the presence of Niogtha’. I then read Reich the description of the underground cities from ‘The Shadow out of Time’, the ‘mighty basalt cities of windowless towers’ built by the ‘half-polypus elder race’.
There could no longer be any reasonable doubt that Love-craft had, in some strange way, anticipated our discoveries. We wasted no time in speculating how this had come about: whether Lovecraft had somehow looked into the future—in the manner described by Dunne in his Experiment with Time—and seen the results of our investigations, or whether his dreaming mind had somehow penetrated these secrets buried below the earth in Asia Minor. This was irrelevant. The question that now presented itself to us was: how much of Lovecraft’s work was mere literary invention, and how much was visionary ‘second sight’?
It seemed strange to be neglecting our archaeological duties to study the works of a writer who had published most of his work in a pulp magazine called Weird Tales. We kept our secret as long as possible, giving it out that we were devoting our days to the study of the cuneiform inscriptions. We spent several days locked in Reich’s room (which was larger than mine), reading steadily through the works of Lovecraft. When our meals arrived, we concealed the books under cushions and pored over photographs of inscriptions. By this time, we had learnt our lesson; we knew what would happen if
any journalist discovered how we occupied our days. We had talked to Derleth on the telescreen—a friendly and courteous old gentleman with abundant white hair—and asked him to mention his discovery to no one. He agreed readily enough, but pointed out that there were still many readers of Lovecraft who were bound to stumble upon the same discovery.
The study of Lovecraft was, in itself, an interesting and pleasant occupation. He was a man of remarkable imagination. Reading his works in chronological order, we observed a gradual change of view-point. 4 The early stories tend to have a New England background, and deal with a fictional county called Arkham, with wild hills and sinister valleys. The inhabitants of Arkham seem to be mostly weird degenerates with a taste for forbidden pleasures and the conjuration of demons. Inevitably, a large number of them come to a violent end. But gradually, there is a change in the tone of Lovecraft’s work. His imagination turns from the horrible to the awe-inspiring, to visions of tremendous aeons of time, of giant cities, of the conflict of monstrous and superhuman races. Except that he continues to write in the language of horror stories—no doubt with his market in mind—he might be considered one of the earliest and best exponents of science fiction. It was mostly with this latter ‘science fiction period’ that we were concerned, (although this should not be taken too literally; a mention of ‘Abhoth the Unclean’ occurs in one of his earliest Arkham stories).
What was most striking was that these ‘cyclopean cities’ of the great old ones (not the polypus race, which they replaced) fitted what we now knew of our own underground city. According to Lovecraft, these cities had no stairs, only inclined planes, for their inhabitants were huge, cone-like creatures with tentacles; the base of the cone was ‘fringed with a rubbery grey substance, which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction’. The probe had revealed that this city below Karatepe had many inclined planes, but apparently no stairs. And its size certainly merited the adjective ‘cyclopean’.
As can well be imagined, our underground city presented a problem that is almost new to archaeology. Layard’s problem of excavating the immense mound of Nimrud was nothing compared to ours. Reich calculated that in order to expose the ruins to the light of day, we would have to move about forty billion tons of earth (using the American billion—a thousand million.) Obviously, this could never be done. An alternative would be to dig a series of wide tunnels down to the city, and create large chambers at the end of these tunnels. It would have to be a series, because we could never risk creating a chamber of any size. No metal known to man could be relied upon to support a roof two miles thick. This would mean that the city itself could never be exposed as a whole; but the use of the probe might show us which parts were best worth the trouble. Even the digging of a single tunnel would involve moving a hundred thousand tons of earth. Still, this was well within the range of possibility.
It took the press exactly one week to catch up with our discovery of Lovecraft. This was, perhaps, the greatest sensation since our original discovery. The newspapers went insane. After all the talk about giants, magicians and dark gods, this was all the story needed. So far, popular archaeologists, pyramid cranks and exponents of the world-ice theory had had a field day. Now it was the turn of the spiritualists, occultists and the rest. Someone wrote an article to demonstrate that Lovecraft had borrowed his mythology from Madame Blavatsky. Someone else declared that it was all part of a cabalistic tradition. Lovecraft suddenly became the most widely read writer in the world; his books sold by the million in every language. And many who read him were terrified, believing that we were about to disturb the ‘great old ones’ in their underground tombs, and that the result would be the catastrophe that Lovecraft describes so powerfully in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.
The city of ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ was unnamed, but in an early Lovecraft novel it is mentioned as ‘Unknown Kadath’. The newspaper writers christened our underground city ‘Kadath’, and the name stuck. And almost immediately, a madman in New York called Dalgleish Fuller announced the formation of an Anti-Kadath society, whose purpose was to prevent us from excavating Kadath and disturbing the Great Old Ones. It is indicative of the insanity of those times that it immediately gained a membership of half a million, which quickly increased to three millions. They adopted the motto: ‘Sanity lies in the future; forget the past’. They bought advertising time on television, and hired respectable psychologists to declare that Lovecraft’s visions were a straightforward example of the Extra-Sensory Perception that Rhine and his colleagues had demonstrated so convincingly at Duke University. In that case, Lovecraft’s warnings should be heeded; if the ‘Great Old Ones’ were disturbed, it might well be the end of the human race. Dalgleish Fuller was a crank with some organizing ability. He rented an enormous area of ground within five miles of Karatepe, and set up a camping site there. His followers were exhorted to take their annual holidays there, and to spend them creating a nuisance at Karatepe. The land was privately owned by a farmer who was glad to accept the immense sums they offered him, and the whole thing was arranged before the Turkish government could take action. Fuller had a gift for attracting cranky rich women, who poured funds into the movement. They bought helicopters that buzzed over the mound dragging sky-signs with anti-Kadath inscriptions on them. At night, the helicopters came and dumped rubbish at the site, so that when we arrived in the morning, it often took several hours to clear away the rotten fruit and vegetables and old tins. The campers made protest marches to the barbed wire twice a day, sometimes in columns of a thousand. It was six weeks before the United Nations could be persuaded to take action and send in troops. By this time, Fuller had recruited five American senators to his party, and together they introduced a bill to ban further digging at Karatepe. They explained, of course, that they were not activated by superstitious fear, but by reverence for a long dead civilization: Had we the right, said they, to disturb the sleep of centuries? It is to the credit of the Senate that the bill was outvoted by an enormous majority.
And just when it seemed that the Anti-Kadath society was losing influence through its noisy excesses, the whole thing was given new impetus with the publication of the findings on Stanlislaw Perzynski and Mirza Din. The facts about these two are briefly as follows. Perzynski was a Pole, Mirza Din was a Persian; both died insane in the first decade of the twentieth century. Perzynski was the better documented of the two; he had gained a certain reputation with a biography of his grandfather, the Russian poet Nadson. He had also edited an edition of the supernatural stories of Count Potocki. In 1898, he published a curious book warning the human race that it was about to be taken over by a race of monsters from another world, who had built enormous cities under the ground. A year later, he was committed to an asylum. His papers included strange sketches that might have been intended for illustrations of Lovecraft’s stories about Kadath: monstrous architecture with inclined planes and great angular towers. These were published in full by the Anti-Kadath society. The case of Mirza Din was more dubious. He was also a writer of apocalyptic visions, which seldom achieved publication. He also spent the last five years of his life in an asylum, writing warning letters to members of the Persian government about a race of monsters that plotted to overrun the earth. Mirza Din located his monsters somewhere in the jungles of central Africa, and described them as looking like huge slugs. Their enormous cities were built from their own slimy excretion, which hardened into a kind of stone.
Most of Mirza Din’s insane letters had been destroyed, but the few that had survived showed a remarkable similarity in style to Perzynsky’s letters, and his slugs were sufficiently like Lovecraft’s cones to lend credibility to the claim that all three were describing the same vision of the ‘Great Old Ones’ and their city.
After the government’s intervention, and the digging of the first tunnel, the activities of the Anti-Kadath society gradually diminished; but for a period of eighteen months, they succeeded in creating a considerable nuisance. Dalgleish Fuller was
murdered by one of his own female disciples under strange circumstances.5
The first tunnel was completed exactly a year after our discovery of the Abhoth block. The digging of the tunnel had been undertaken by the Italian government, who used the same giant mole that had already been used in the construction of the tunnel between Scilla and Messina (in Sicily), and later between Otranto and Linguetta in Albania. The digging itself took only a few days, but the chief problem was to prevent the lower parts of the tunnel from collapsing. The block itself was as impressive as we had expected—sixty-eight feet high, thirty feet wide, ninety feet long, carved out of solid volcanic basalt. It became impossible to doubt that we were dealing with a race of giants or magicians. From the existence of the basalt figurines, I was inclined to doubt that they had been a race of giants; the figurines were too small. (It was not until ten years later that Mercer’s dramatic discoveries in Tanzania revealed that these great cities were inhabited both by giants and by human beings, and that the giants were almost certainly the slaves of the human beings.)