Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (62 page)

“Ah, literature. What kind of literature?”

“At the moment, I’m interested in the local legends. Someone mentioned that you knew a great deal about them.”

“Ah, they did, eh? Well, I suppose I do. What did you say your name was?”

I repeated it, and mentioned the University of Virginia, and my major publications. There were odd mumbling noises at the other end of the line, as if he were eating his moustache and finding it hard to swallow. Finally, he said:

“Look here … supposing you come over here a bit later this evening, around nine? We can have a drink and talk.”

I thanked him, and went back to the lounge, where there was a good fire, and ordered another rum. I felt I deserved congratulations, after Mr. Evans’s warnings about the Colonel. Only one thing worried me. I still had no idea of who he was, or what kind of legends interested him. I could only guess that he was the local antiquary

At half past eight, after an ample but unimaginative supper of lamb chops, boiled potatoes, and some unidentifiable green vegetable, I set out for the Colonel’s house, having enquired the way from the desk clerk, who was obviously intrigued. It was still raining and windy, but my cold was held at bay by the grog.

The Colonel’s house was outside the town, halfway up a steep hill. There was a rusty iron gate, and a driveway full of pools of muddy water. When I rang the doorbell, ten dogs began to bark at once, and one approached the door on the other side and snarled discouragingly. A plump Welsh woman opened the door, slapped the Doberman pinscher that growled and slavered, and led me past a pack of yelping dogs—several, I noticed, with scars and torn ears—into a dimly lit library smelling of coal smoke. I’m not sure what sort of a man I expected to meet—probably tall and British, with a sunburned face and bristly moustache—but he proved rather a surprise. Short and twisted—a riding accident had broken his right hip—his dark complexion suggested mixed blood, while the receding chin gave him a slightly reptilian look. On first acquaintance, a definitely repellant character. His eyes were bright and intelligent, but mistrustful. He struck me as a man who could generate considerable resentment. He
shook my hand and asked me to sit down. I sat near the fire. A cloud of smoke immediately billowed out, making me choke and gasp.

“Needs sweeping,” said my host. “Try that chair.” A few moments later, something fell down the chimney along with a quantity of soot, and before the flames made it unrecognisable, I thought I recognised the skeleton of a bat. I surmised—correctly, as it turned out—that Colonel Urquart had few visitors, and therefore few occasions to use the library.

“Which of my books have you come across?” he asked me.

“I … er … to be quite honest, I only know them by hearsay.”

I was relieved when he said dryly: “Like most people. Still, it’s encouraging to know you’re interested.”

At this point, looking past his head, I noticed his name on the spine of a book. It seemed a rather luridly designed dust jacket, and the title,
The Mysteries of Mu
, was quite clearly visible in scarlet letters. So I added quickly:

“Of course, I don’t know a great deal about Mu. I remember reading a book by Spence.…”

“Total charlatan!” Urquart snapped, and I thought his eyes took on a reddish tinge in the firelight.

“And then,” I added, “Robert Graves has some curious theories about Wales and the Welsh.…”

“Lost tribes of Israel, indeed! I’ve never heard such an infantile and far-fetched idea! Anyone could tell you it’s nonsense. And besides, I’ve proved conclusively that the Welsh are survivors from the lost continent of Mu. I have evidence to prove it. No doubt you’ve come across some of it.”

“Not as much as I could have wished,” I said, wondering what I’d let myself in for.

At this point he interrupted himself to offer me a whisky, and I had to make a quick decision—whether to plead another appointment and escape, or to stick it out. The sound of rain on the windows decided me. I would stick it out.

As he poured the whisky, he said, “I think I can guess what you are thinking. Why Mu rather than Atlantis?”

“Why, indeed,” I said, in a bemused way. I wasn’t even aware, at that stage, that Mu was supposed to have been situated in the Pacific.

“Quite. I asked myself exactly that question twenty years ago, when I first made my discoveries. Why Mu, when the major relics lie in South Wales and Providence?”

“Providence? Which Providence?”

“Rhode Island. I have proof that it was the centre of the religion of the survivors from Mu.

“Relics. This, for example.” He handed me a chunk of green stone,
almost too heavy to hold in one hand. I had never seen such stone before, although I know a little about geology. Neither had I seen anything like the drawing and inscription cut into it, except once in a temple in the jungles of Brazil. The inscription was in curved characters, not unlike Pitman’s shorthand; the face in the midst of them could have been a devil mask, or a snake god, or a sea monster. As I stared at it, I felt the same distaste—the sense of
nastiness
—that I had experienced on first seeing the Voynich manuscript. I took a large swallow of my whisky. Urquart indicated the “sea monster.”

“The symbol of the people of Mu. The Yambi. This stone is their colour. It’s one of the ways to learn where they’ve been—water of that colour.”

I looked at him blankly. “In what way?”

“When they destroy a place, they like to leave behind pools of water—small lakes, if possible. You can always tell them because they look slightly different from an ordinary pool of water. You get this combination of the green of stagnation, and that bluey-grey you can see here.”

He turned to the bookshelf and took down an expensive art book with a title like
The Pleasures of Ruins
. He opened it and pointed at a photograph. It was in colour.

“Look at this—Sidon in Lebanon. The same green water. And look at this: Anuradhapura in Ceylon—the same green and blue. Colours of decay and death. Both places they destroyed at some point. There are six more that I know of.”

I was fascinated and impressed in spite of myself; perhaps it was the stone that did it.

“But how did they do that?”

“You make the usual mistake—of thinking of them as being like ourselves. They weren’t. In human terms, they were formless and invisible.”

“Invisible?”

“Like wind or electricity. You have to understand they were
forces
rather than beings. They weren’t even clear separate identities, as we are. That’s stated in Churchward’s Naacal tablets.”

He proceeded to talk, and I shall not attempt to set down all he said. A lot of it struck me as sheer nonsense. But there was a crazy logic in much of it. He would snatch up books off his shelves and read me passages—most of these, as far as I could see, by all kinds of cranks. But he would then take up a textbook of anthropology or paleontology, and read some extract that seemed to confirm what he had just said.

What he told me, in brief, was this. The continent of Mu existed in the South Pacific between twenty thousand and twelve thousand years ago. It consisted of two races, one of which resembled present-day man. The other consisted of Urquart’s “invisible ones from the stars.”
These latter, he said, were definitely aliens on our earth, and the chief among them was called Ghatanothoa, the dark one. They sometimes took forms, such as the monster on the tablet—who was a representation of Ghatanothoa—but existed as “vortices” of power in their natural state. They were not benevolent, in our sense, for their instincts and desires were completely unlike ours. A tradition of the Naacal tablets has it that these beings created man, but this, Urquart said, must be incorrect, since archaeological evidence proved that man had evolved over millions of years. However, the men on Mu were certainly their slaves, and were apparently treated with what we would consider unbelievable barbarity. The Lloigor, or star-beings, could amputate limbs without causing death, and did this at the least sign of rebelliousness. They could also cause cancer-like tentacles to grow on their human slaves, and also used this as a form of punishment. One picture in the Naacal tablets shows a man with tentacles growing from both eye sockets.

But Urquart’s theory about Mu had an extremely original touch. He told me that there was one major difference between the Lloigor and human beings. The Lloigor were deeply and wholly pessimistic. Urquart pointed out that we could hardly imagine what this meant. Human beings live on hopes of various kinds. We know we have to die. We have no idea where we came from, or where we are going to. We know that we are subject to accident and illness. We know that we seldom achieve what we want; and if we achieve it, we have ceased to appreciate it. All this we know, and yet we remain incurably optimistic, even deceiving ourselves with absurd, patently nonsensical, beliefs about life after death.

“Why am I talking to you,” said Urquart, “although I know perfectly well that no professor has an open mind, and every one I’ve had any dealings with has betrayed me? Because I think that you might be the exception—you might grasp the truth of what I’m saying. But why should I want it known, when I have to die like everyone else? Absurd, isn’t it? Yet we’re
not
reasonable creatures. We live and act on an unreasonable reflex of optimism—a mere reflex, like your knee kicking when someone taps it. It’s obviously completely stupid. Yet we live by it.”

I found myself impressed by him, in spite of my conviction that he was slightly mad. He was certainly intelligent.

He went on to explain that the Lloigor, although infinitely more powerful than men, were also aware that optimism would be absurd in this universe. Their minds were a unity, not compartmentalised, like ours. There was no distinction in them between conscious, subconscious, and superconscious mind. So they saw things clearly all the time, without the possibility of averting the mind from the truth, or forgetting. Mentally speaking, the closest equivalent to them would be
one of those suicidal romantics of the nineteenth century, steeped in gloom, convinced that life is a pit of misery, and accepting this as a basis for everyday life. Urquart denied that the Buddhists resemble the Lloigor in their ultimate pessimism—not merely because of the concept of Nirvana, which offers a kind of absolute, equivalent to the Christian God, but because no Buddhist really lives in the constant contemplation of his pessimism. He accepts it intellectually, but does not feel it with his nerves and bones. The Lloigor
lived
their pessimism.

Unfortunately—and here I found it hard to follow Urquart—the earth is not suitable for such pessimism, on a subatomic level. It is a young planet. All its energy processes are still in the uphill stage, so to speak; they are evolutionary, making for complexification, and therefore, the destruction of negative forces. A simple example of this is the way that so many of the romantics died young; the earth simply will not tolerate subversive forces.

Hence the legend that the Lloigor created men as their slaves. For why should all-powerful beings require slaves? Only because of the active hostility, so to speak, of the earth itself. To counteract this hostility, to carry out their simplest purposes, they needed creatures who worked on an optimistic basis. And so men were created, deliberately short-sighted creatures, incapable of steadily contemplating the obvious truth about the universe.

What had then happened had been absurd. The Lloigor had been increasingly weakened by their life on earth. Urquart said that the documents offer no reasons for the Lloigor’s leaving their home, probably situated in the Andromeda nebula. They had gradually become less and less an active force. And their slaves had taken over, becoming the men of today. The Naacal tablets and other works that have come down from Mu are the creation of these men, not of the original “gods.” The earth has favoured the evolution of its ungainly, optimistic children, and weakened the Lloigor. Nevertheless, these ancient powers remain. They have retreated under the earth and sea, in order to concentrate their power in stones and rocks, whose normal metabolism they can reverse. This has enabled them to cling to the earth for many thousands of years. Occasionally, they accumulate enough energy to erupt once again into human life, and the results are whole cities destroyed. At one time, it was the whole continent—Mu itself—and later still, Atlantis. They had always been particularly virulent when they had been able to find traces of their previous slaves. They are responsible for many archaeological mysteries—great ruined cities of South America, Cambodia, Burma, Ceylon, North Africa, even Italy. And then, according to Urquart, the two great ruined cities of North America, Grudèn Itzà, now sunk beneath the swampland
around New Orleans, and Nam-Ergest, a flourishing city that once stood on the land where the Grand Canyon now yawns. The Grand Canyon, Urquart said, was not created by earth erosion, but by a tremendous underground explosion followed by a “hail of fire.” He suspects that, like the great Siberian explosion, it was produced by some kind of atomic bomb. To my question of why there were not signs of an explosion around the Grand Canyon, Urquart had two replies: that it had taken place so long ago that most signs of it had been destroyed by natural forces, and second, that to any unprejudiced observer, it is plain enough that the Grand Canyon is an immense and irregular crater.

After two hours of this, and several helpings of his excellent whisky, I felt so confused that I had completely lost track of the questions I wanted to ask. I said I had to go to bed and think about it all, and the Colonel offered to run me home in his car. One of my questions came back to me as I climbed into the passenger seat of the ancient Rolls-Royce.

“What did you mean about the Welsh being survivors of Mu?”

“What I said. I am certain—I have evidence to prove—that they are descendents of the slaves of the Lloigor.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“All kinds. It would take another hour to explain.”

“Couldn’t you give me some hint?”