The Call of Cthulhu | Page 7

through those
nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now
and then the less organized ululation would cease, and from what
seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song
chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner,
came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one

fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad
cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp
water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and
nearly hypnotised with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an
acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and
twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but
a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn
were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped
bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the
curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in
height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the
noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at
regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head
downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had
disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers
jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from
left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the
ring of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes
which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard
antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot
deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man,
Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved
distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint
beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a
mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees but I suppose he had
been hearing too much native superstition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief
duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a
hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their
firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five
minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild
blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the

end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners,
whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of
policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely
wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their
fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully
removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness,
the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and
mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of Negroes
and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape
Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.
But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that
something far deeper and older than Negro fetishism was involved.
Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising
consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages
before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of
the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the
sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first
men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and
the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden
in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when
the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of
R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath
his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the
secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even
torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the
conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the
faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever
seen the