by Donald Tyson
The Alexandrian owner of the scroll has never spoken of the substitution, and it must be presumed that from that day until the present, those who pay in gold for the right to transcribe this text work from an imposture based on the parchment leaves of this clever scribe and not from the original, which is said to be kept safely concealed somewhere in Damascus. Alas, the necromancer was careless in his penning of the Greek letters, since he knew beforehand that he would leave the shuttered chamber with the original, and his copy contains numerous errors in the pronunciation of the language of the Old Ones that make it of little value, other than as an expensive curiosity.
aving exhausted the possibilities and the hospitality of Egypt, the seeker after arcane wisdom does well to turn his face to the north across the sea, and thence east to the valley between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, where are the monuments and cities of Babylonia, which was great beneath the stars when the world was young. This region is an arid plain from which rise at intervals the temples of the ancients, erected upon mounds of rubble that elevate them above the surrounding land. The mounds are not natural but are the result of countless generations of human habitation, each built upon the ashes of the one that went before it, mute testimony that this land has been the dwelling place of our race longer than any other.
The temples are in the form of pyramids that differ from those of the Egyptians in that their sides are not smooth, but stepped in a multitude of levels, each smaller than the one below it. Nor are they burial places of kings but houses of religion. Upon their flat tops worship was made beneath the night sky, for this people adored the stars as their gods and diligently sought an understanding of their patterns and motions, so that
no race was more versed in the art of astrology. It was they who gave the names to the stars and who first predicted their cyclical turnings.
Their gods are of the heavens, but their demons are of the earth and the places beneath the earth, and they excel in their knowledge of these malevolent beings. Each ziggurat is built on top of a gateway to the lower regions and acts as its seal, preventing the escape of the evil creatures of the depths into the upper world, where they would ravage the land and wantonly slay all who tried to oppose them. By the powers of the upper gods are these gateways sealed, but only for so long as the gods are adored and offered sacrifice. Most of the ziggurats have fallen into disuse and been abandoned, even by the cults of the old gods who remember their purpose, and the locks upon the lower gates have been allowed to decay and have lost their force, so that at times when the moon is dark the evil things below creep upward into the plains and hunt for prey.
Each ziggurat draws baneful force from the depths of the earth, and by its very shape and certain signs carven on stones that are set within it in a precise pattern, it projects its accumulated potency in a ray that traverses no common space such as men know, but the gulfs of time. By great fires lighted on the tops of these temples are the time rays projected. A ray cannot be sent out for more than several minutes, and only at long intervals, for it consumes the force accumulated in its ziggurat over the span of years, and the ziggurat must then be allowed to lie fallow to restore its potential; and this is the reason the Babylonians made many of these monuments, placing them wherever the gates to the infernal regions below the earth gave vent to its dark strength, that they would have rays with which to pierce the veil of time when needed.
The men of the plain were taught the making of the ziggurats by their most secret and most revered gods, who are a race of time spanners known to the Babylonians as the Watchers; it is the practice of this divine race to peer through time both into the past and future, searching out secret wisdom and building rays to carry them from one age to another. In their own tongue they call themselves the Great Race, and their world they call Yith. They are not native to our earthly sphere, but came here long ages ago in intangible form by means of a kind of soul flight across the stars and inhabited the bodies of the creatures they found, making those forms their own; for they are so ancient that the shape of their original bodies, if indeed they ever were bound to one flesh, has been forgotten even by the Yithians themselves.
Stories of the Watchers abound, making it an easy matter to draw them from the lips of the young priests in the wine shops, where they daily gather to whore and gamble, for there are no more profligate or lewd holy men in all the world than those who dwell between the great rivers. They will not speak of their gods while sober, but after they become drunk they boast of their power and of their own intimate communication with these strange beings. For the price of a few cups of wine they will gladly expound on their entire history, insofar as it is known to their religion.
The priests tell how the Great Race fled the destruction of their own world, though what cataclysm caused its end they have never revealed to those who worship them. In the primal mists of our past, their souls flew across vast deserts of space and took up habitation in the largest and strongest creatures then living upon our world that were compatible with their minds. The body of these beings is said to be like a cone having long arms with pincers that resemble those of the scorpion, and atop it is a small round head alongside a separate stalk from which extends a projecting mouth in form similar to the bell of a trumpet. They are seldom glimpsed by those who worship them, for the Yithians prefer still to travel time in a bodiless state and to assume the body of some convenient form of life when they arrive at their destination.
Long ago they came forward in time to the land of Babylonia and inhabited the bodies of men, who are remembered in the Hebrew creation text titled Bereshit as the sons of God; for even though this occurred in our distant past, it was a future time to the Yithians. They carried no physical tools or weapons with them across time, having not the power to move material things in this way without the aid of the ziggurats, but their wisdom was greater than that of any man, and eventually they came to rule the land, for the bodies of their hosts were rendered deathless by their presence. For their pleasure, and to fulfill their purposes in the age of mankind, they took in marriage the most beautiful of the women of noble birth and bred within their wombs daughters and sons, creating a new race that was outwardly in the shape of man but inwardly possessed a portion of the vast intelligence of their fathers.
The sons of the Watchers were mighty warriors, and long of years; they made war against the peoples of all the surrounding lands and forced them into subjugation under one king, who was the leader of the Watchers inhabiting our age; in numbers the Watchers were few, but their sons multiplied and became many. They applied their great minds to the wisdom of the Watchers, which was freely given to them. In this way they became masters not only of warfare but of metalworking and of the making of ornaments, and of the use of enchantments, and in the knowledge of the heavens. As their wisdom increased, so did their wickedness, and no equal is to be found to match their delight in depravity and abomination.
These matters are written of in the book of Enoch the prophet, who entered one of the rays of the ziggurats and was seen no more in the times of our history, or so teach the degenerate priests who still light fires atop these monuments and make gates to give offerings to the Watchers. Enoch wrote truly but he did not write all that he knew, and he did not know everything concerning the acts of the Yithians among man. He veiled his words in the conventions of his faith to make them less strange, and dared not write the true name of the Watchers, which is inscribed plainly here.
After the wealth and peoples of all the lands between the rivers were subjugated by the children of the Watchers and their generations, the construction of the ziggurats began. By their wisdom the Watchers selected the places of power and oversaw the building of the towers of stone and brick, and the fixing within their walls of the carven seals that were able to direct the force accumulated, when activated by the heat of fire. The primary purpose of the ziggurats is the transportation of material objects across time. Although it was within the ability of the Yithians to proje
ct their souls into the future and inhabit the bodies of men, it was not within their capacity to carry the things they coveted in our time back to their ancient age, or to bring their strange conical bodies forward to our time.
This the ziggurats allowed them to do, but only for brief periods of minutes, and only for the passage of a single being or a cargo of precious substances of the weight of a horse. Once used, a ziggurat must lie inert for years before its potential to project a ray of time is regained. These limitations greatly frustrated the Watchers, who desired free travel and transportation between their own time and our time. For this reason, they conceived a great ziggurat higher and broader than any that had yet been made, to the intent that it would possess so vast a force that its ray would shine through the years unceasingly, requiring no period of restoration, and make as it were an open doorway through time; but this ambition proved to be their downfall.
he story of the great ziggurat of eternity is related in the book of creation of the Hebrews, who received it from the Babylonians during their captivity after the fall of the First Temple, but it is not well told, and many things must be added to the tale before it may be understood by the wise. The Hebrews called it Babel, a word they took to signify many tongues, but in the language of Yith babel means the unending portal, for so the towering monument, larger than anything that has ever been made by the hands of man, was called by the Watchers.
The creatures of Yith are a patient race, as befits the masters of time. Over the span of several human generations they prepared the foundations of the tower, having by their arts located the place upon the land between the rivers possessed of the greatest conflux of subterranean forces converging there in mighty lines like the spokes of a wheel. More generations passed while they transported carven seals from their own distant time through the rays of lesser portals; they were made from a strange stone not to be quarried in the age of the Watchers, for the hills from which it came had long before sunk beneath the waves of the sea.
With great care the seals were inserted into the body of the ziggurat as its courses mounted ever upward to the clouds. As the seals multiplied in number, they drew power up from the earth, and the entire ziggurat began to glow with strange colors and to throb with a deep tone like the low chant of many voices.
The common workmen who laid the stones into their places began to look fearfully at one another, and some cast down their tools and refused to labor, but the arrogant descendents of the Watchers lashed them with whips and slayed with swords those who would not rise up from their bellies, so that by the fear they created in the hearts of their subjects, the terror of the strange colors and mighty drone was overcome, and the work was completed. On the night the portal of eternity was to be opened, all of the Watchers, who are said in the book of Enoch the prophet to have been two hundred in number, assembled on the mount of the ziggurat, and with them gathered their sons among men, and their descendents even to the tenth generation, for all wished to witness the wonder of the portal.
The colors shimmering upon the stones of the ziggurat were blinding, and the deep drone from within its body could be felt through sandals upon the soles of the feet, or so say the chronicles of the priests who adore at the lesser ziggurats in our own age. The king himself, who was the leader of the Watchers and of many years, set torch to kindling and lit the fire upon the altar. As was expected, a beam of white light ascended upward to the heavens, and where this beam arose from the flames, a portal through time was opened.
So great was the acclamation of the thousands gathered to view the event that few noticed the deeper rumble within the stones beneath them, or the flicker that began to dance along the ascending ray. As the rumble grew louder, the cries of voices dimmed and at last turned into a babble of uncertainty. Even the king, who stood nearest the altar, had difficulty keeping upon his feet, and finally was thrown to his hands and knees with an expression of astonishment. A great bolt of lightning, but many thousands of times larger than any lightning that the world had ever witnessed, struck downward along the ascending beam of light and cut its path into the center of the ziggurat through its stones, melting them with its heat. All were blinded and deafened, and many at the topmost tire of the structure were instantly cast off its sides to their deaths.
The rumble in the earth grew louder as the people fled down the stair that wound in a spiral around the four sloping sides of the tower, pushing those who blocked their path over the edges. At last the ziggurat was split as though by a sword of fire, and its stones fell in a thunderous cascade. All who remained in confusion upon its heights were killed, and most of those who occupied its intermediate levels. Only a few escaped death from the rain of stones, those who had fled the heights quickly and those on the lowermost level who were of the tenth generation of the children of the Watchers, whose blood was weakest and who had not merited the honor of a higher place upon the ziggurat.
The dawn revealed a smoking ruin of blackened stones and thousands of charred and naked corpses, the garments of which had burned away, lying scattered across the plain. The Watchers were no more; of their strongest children only a few lived, and within the span of a month all who had stood upon the ziggurat were dead, for the lightning that shattered the tower sent into the blood of everyone who stood upon its levels a kind of poison that took away their strength and caused their hair to fall from their heads. The governing of the land was cast into complete confusion, for no one remained to lead. Those peoples subjugated by the Watchers resumed their old customs and their languages, and returned to their ancient homes. So were the peoples of the plain scattered, and thus was their greatness lost. Where they had been one nation under the rule of the Watchers, they became many nations.
These things happened uncounted generations before the rise of Babylon, yet the fall of the great ziggurat is depicted upon one of the gold plates in the pillared hall beneath the sphinx. It shows the tower split by lightning, and two of the Watchers cast down from its heights. Only a man who has heard the story of the fall of Babel would comprehend its true meaning.
The tending of the fires upon the lesser ziggurats continues even to our time, though the ignorance of those who gather wood for the fires is so great, only the priests know what purpose they serve. The rays are still sent through time into the ancient world where dwell the Yithians in their primordial bodies, and offerings of cakes and wine are passed through the portals above the flames, but for many ages nothing has emerged out of those portals. The Great Race is ever patient, and it may be that they are merely awaiting conditions suited to their purposes before once again sending their souls ahead in time, for the sending of souls requires no portal. How long they will wait, no man can tell.
t is not safe to walk amid the ruins of Babylon at night where the ghosts of the city howl their outrage upon the wind, which remembers as by an echo their cries when the city was destroyed and made a wilderness for beasts, and how they were put to the swords of the conquerors, even the women and infants. The foundation stones are almost as old as those of the ziggurats on the plain; to touch them is to feel their years, which make the stones of Egypt seem newly quarried, save for the stone of the Sphinx. No common habitations stand where Babylon once flourished; few venture there under the sun, and fewer still have the courage to enter the fallen bones of its gates beneath the moon. The land is given over wholly to death, and the past, and creatures of evil purpose.
When Babylon was overthrown, its walls and temples were pulled down even to the final course of brick or stone, and its wells were filled with sand, but the sewers that lie beneath the city were not destroyed, and in part remain as they were, though they are dry. These channels are a work of wondrous skill comparable to the ingenuity of the Romans, for the slops and wastes of the city did not flow in gutters down the center of the streets as they do in most of our modern cities, but in large tunnels beneath the earth that shielded the inhabitants from their stenches and caused the removal of the rats to the underground
where they were of little trouble. These tunnels are arched and high enough for a tall man to walk upright; in places they are so wide that they cannot be spanned by the outstretched arms. Places where the roofing has fallen in provide a feeble and intermittent glow during the day, and by moonlight, but the slanting rays serve more as a guide than as an illumination.
Beneath the center of the city is a deep and wide cistern or catch pit that captured the heavier wastes and prevented them from clogging the smaller tunnels that carried the outflow away from the city walls. No doubt when Babylon was inhabited it was periodically dredged and emptied. Presently it serves as the living place of a strange creature who may be said to be the monarch of Babylon, since no other foul thing of the night dares to contest its preeminence. It is one of the offspring of Shub-Niggurath, and is older than the city itself. Its scaled body glows with the redness of dying embers. In size it is equal to the largest horse, and in form it somewhat resembles the griffin, save that its tail is barbed and all four of its legs are taloned. Great black wings without feathers, but leathern like the wings of a bat, it keeps folded along its hunched back, and since its food is not to be found in the tunnels or the ruins of the city, it uses these wings to fly abroad across the night sky seeking prey.
Truly it is a fearsome monster, and to be avoided except by the boldest of travelers seeking arcane wisdom not to be learned in more placid circumstances. To those possessing the secret to hold it at bay it is a fountain of knowledge, and for this reason, that it has not one head but seven, and these heads extend on elongated necks from its hulking shoulders and change their forms constantly; always the number of the heads is seven, but they are never the same seven heads. Their faces and shapes transform one into another as they are watched, becoming now the head of an old man and now the head of a soldier, now the head of a child and now the head of a harlot, or maiden, or priest, or slave, for this beast is an eater of human flesh and seeks no other food.