For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea and possible rescue.
On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day I forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher than any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had appeared from a distance; an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the hill.
I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically gibbous6 moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my pack, I started for the crest of the eminence.
I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illuminate. I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.7
As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy foot-holds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps8 where no light had yet penetrated.
All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite slope, which rose steeply about an hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.9
Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist’s10 or archæologist’s delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith;11 on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics12 unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books; consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Several characters obviously represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain.13
It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Doré.14 I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer,15 they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size, but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown16 or Neanderthal Man17 was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.
Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like,18 and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds.19 I think I went mad then.
Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.
When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated enthnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God;20 but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.
It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm—a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.
&
nbsp; The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!21
Cover from The Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft: Dagon, no. 1.
Caliber Press, 1993
(artist: Sergio Cariello)
Poster from Dagon (Castelao Producciones, 2001), directed by Stuart Gordon.
Cover of The Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft: Dagon, no. 2.
Caliber Press, 1993 (artist: Sergio Cariello)
Cover from H. P. Lovecraft’s Dagon by Mark Rudolph. (CVBooks4, 2011)
1. Written in the summer of 1917, it first appeared in The Vagrant 11 (November 1919), 23–29. It subsequently appeared in Weird Tales 2, no. 3 (October 1923), 23–25.
2. Now commonly referred to as World War I, the Great War began on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, exactly five years later. The nations at war included the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the British Empire, France, and Italy.
3. In the version published in The Vagrant, the narrator refers to the forces of the “Kaiser,” not the Hun. In a speech reported in Die Weser-Zeitung on July 28, 1900, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany made the following remarks concerning rebels in China (with regard to suppressing what became known as the Boxer Rebellion): “Mercy will not be shown, prisoners will not be taken. Just as a thousand years ago, the Huns under Attila won a reputation of might that lives on in legends, so may the name of Germany in China, such that no Chinese will ever again dare so much as to look askance at a German.” The term “Huns,” with a push from Allied propaganda, came to be applied broadly to the militant Germans in the Great War.
4. The narrator here refers to the shift in German policy regarding attacks by submarine, or Unterseeboot (U-boat). Initially, German commanders observed the historical “prize rules” governing the capture of enemy civilian ships and their crew and passengers, internationally agreed-upon protocol dating from the previous century. However, on October 20, 1914, the German U-17 sank the SS Glitra, a merchant ship, off Norway, and on February 4, 1915, the kaiser declared the waters surrounding England and Ireland to be a war zone. Thereafter, U-boat captains were permitted to sink merchant ships, even potentially neutral ones, without warning.
5. No land-based volcanic eruption was recorded in 1914 or 1915 in the Pacific. Records of submarine volcanic activity are poor to nonexistent. In September 1909, George R. Putnam, whom President William Taft the following year appointed the first commissioner of lighthouses (Putnam would go on to serve six presidents), wrote, in “The Hidden Perils of the Deep” (National Geographic), “Volcanic action in well authenticated cases has caused islands to rise or disappear. In the present location of Bogoslof Island, in [the] Bering Sea, the early voyagers described a ‘sail rock.’ In this position in 1796 there arose a high island. In 1883 another island appeared near it. In 1906 a high cone arose between the two, and a continuous island was formed. . . .” Earlier in 1909, a piece in National Geographic by Captain F. M. Munger referred to Bogoslof Island as a “jack in the box” and reported “the appearance and disappearance of peaks on the island. . . .”
6. More than half full. T. R. Livesey, in “Dispatches from the Providence Observatory: Astronomical Motifs and Sources in the Writings of H. P. Lovecraft,” points out that full moons rise at sunset and quarter moons rise at noon or midnight; so only a gibbous moon could rise after sunset and be “near the zenith.” That is, this and other data in the story regarding the moon are accurate.
7. In John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), a treatment of the biblical Fall of Man, Satan rebels against God and climbs from Tartarus, to which he has fallen, to the material world. In Greek mythology, Tartarus is both a primordial deity and a place situated in the bowels of the underworld. The word is derived from Τάρταρος, the grime (or tartar) on the inside surface of a cask.
8. “Stygian” refers to the river Styx in a dark and gloomy region of the underworld.
9. The scene compares to the discovery of the monolith, first by apes and then by human visitors to Earth’s moon, in Stanley Kubrick’s epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
10. It is hard to recall today that “scientist” was a relatively new term, first used in 1840, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
11. “Huge, massive, like the Cyclops of classic mythology” (E. Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable [hereinafter “Brewer”], 322). The Pelasgic ruins of Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy, such as the Gallery of Tiryns, the Gate of Lyons, the Treasury of Athens, and the Tombs of Phoroneus and Danaos, are examples of so-called Cyclopean masonry. Cyclopean architecture is mentioned in numerous other stories below. Whatever else may be said definitely about the Elder Gods and their followers, they liked large buildings.
Mycenaean wall.
12. The earliest evidence of symbolic writing is cuneiform, highly stylized wedge-shaped writing found in Sumerian texts dating from about 3300 BCE. While cuneiform may have originated as pictures, the pictorial element became lost and the shapes arbitrary. Hieroglyphic or pictographic writing with recognizable pictures may be traced as far back as the Egyptian writing that flourished a few hundred years after the Sumerians, as well as that of Cretan and Minoan civilizations of the Bronze Age (more than 2,000 years before the common era). Hieroglyphic writing remained static in Egypt for more than 3,000 years and flourished in many later cultures, including several in the New World. Egyptyian hieroglyphics were largely decoded in the early nineteenth century, after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, but Cretan hieroglyphs, although compiled in 1909, have resisted definitive decipherment. Recently, crowdsourcing the decipherment has been propounded as a means to address the formidable task. .
13. It has long been speculated that forms of sea life unknown to contemporary science exist at great depths. See, for example, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869), in which giant cuttlefish attack. For a menagerie of real-life horrors discovered in the deep, see http://www.oddee.com/item_79915.aspx.
14. Paul Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was a French artist, engraver, and sculptor best remembered for his nightmarish London: A Pilgrimage (1872), a collection of 180 engravings depicting some of the worst slums of London.
“Turn him out!—Ratcliff” by Gustave Doré, 1872.
15. Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–1873), was an immensely popular writer of his day, primarily of novels. Bulwer-Lytton coined many phrases but will always be remembered for the purple prose that opens his 1830 novel Paul Clifford: “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” In this context, however, the narrator is thinking of Bulwer-Lytton’s horror/science-fiction stories, such as “The Haunted and the Haunters; or, the House and the Brain” (1859) or The Coming Race, published later as Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871), which tells of a subterranean race waiting to reclaim the surface of the earth (a theme with obvious resonance here).
16. In 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed to have reconstructed from fragments discovered at Piltdown (in East Sussex, England) a skull of a prehistoric man predating the then earliest-known specimens. The “Piltdown Man,” as the discovery became known, was immediately challenged, and as early as 1923, a complete refutation was made by anatomist and physical anthropologist Franz Weidenreich. However, it was not until 1953 that the discovery was exposed as a forgery, made by an unknown hoaxer.
17. Neanderthals—Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis—were first identified in 1829 by Philippe-Charles Schmerling. They are generally believed t
o have first appeared, in fully developed form, about 130,000 years ago.
18. Polypheme, a son of Poseidon, the sea god, was “[o]ne of the Cyclops, who lived in Sicily. He was an enormous giant, with only one eye, and that in the middle of his forehead. When Ulyssses landed on the island, this monster made him and twelve of his crew captives; six of them he ate, and then Ulysses contrived to blind him, and make good his escape with the rest of the crew” (Brewer, 995).
19. S. T. Joshi, in The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos (27), points out that the creature is worshipping at the monolith, as are the creatures depicted on it. “Polyphemus-like,” then, appears to refer to the creature’s size, not to the number of its eyes. Note that the beings depicted on the monolith are also quite large, and so we may conclude that the creature is one of that race of beings.
20. Brewer mentions Dagon as “the idol of the Philistines; half woman and half fish” (325). Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book I, lines 462–65) refers to this god as well:
Dagon his name; sea-monster, upward man
And downward fish; yet had his temple high;
Rear’d in Azotus, dreaded through the coast
Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon,
And Accaron and Gaza’s frontier bounds.
The Bible also speaks of the worship of Dagon (Hebrew for “little fish”) in the temple of Azotus, an ancient Philistine city now identified with modern Gaza or Ashdod in southern Israel (1 Samuel 5:1–7). Later, Dagon was conflated with an agricultural god and worshipped as a national god by the Philistines. However, the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed.) suggests that the notion of the half-human part of the idol is mistaken and that “only his fish part was left to him.” Lovecraft is likely to have known of this reading.
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