The Call of Cthulhu | Page 6

exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began
at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied
an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested,
he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables
taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an
exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence
when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the
phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart.
What, in substance, both the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana
swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very
like this: the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in
the phrase as chanted aloud:
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several
among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants
had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like
this:
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector
Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp
worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached
profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker
and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic
imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least
expected to possess it.
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a
frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The
squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of
Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing
which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but
voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of
their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent
tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted
woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and
harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and,
the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile,
had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide.
At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on
in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came.
Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them,
and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall
intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every
malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length
the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and
hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing
lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far

ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind
shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through pale undergrowth
beyond the endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left
alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to
advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector
Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black
arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil
repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There
were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which
dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and
squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in
inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before
d'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the
wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and
to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough
to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest
fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence
perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more
than the shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by
Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward
the red glare and muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar
to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear
the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and
orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by
howls and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated