Abdul Alhazred

Always a dweller on the surface of fantasy and strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual runes and riddles left by a fabulous past for the guidance or puzzlement of posterity.

He read things like the frightful Book of Eibon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he had seen them.

Edward was twenty when my son and only child was born, and seemed pleased when I named the newcomer Edward Derby Upton after him.

By the time he was twenty-five, Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man and a fairly well-known poet and fantasist, though his lack of contacts and responsibilities had slowed down his literary growth by making his products derivative and over-bookish.

with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible.

Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.

I was rather sorry later on that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.

On the seventh of November, sight of the western range having been temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts.

The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic entities.

They had done the same thing on other planets; having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community.

These viscous masses were without a doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the shoggoths in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existing on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.

When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply of shoggoths, they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes; extirpating any whose presence became troublesome.

Right.

Hopkinson slides the book out and realizes he is holding a copy of the Necronomicon, the infamous grimoire of dark magic and cosmic horror authored by Abdul Alhazred.

Hopkinson, being an educated solicitor, starts translating the Latin text on the page.

That is not dead, which can eternal lie.

It was not allied to the European witch cult and was virtually unknown beyond its members.

No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet.

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange eons even death may die.

Lagrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult.

By the time the rite was over, Carter knew that he was in no region whose place could be told by Earth's geographers, and in no age whose date history could fix, for the nature of what was happening was not wholly unfamiliar to him.

There were hints of it in the cryptic old narcotic fragments, and a whole chapter in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul al-Hazred, had taken on significance when he had deciphered the designs graven on the silver key a gate had been unlocked not indeed the ultimate gate but one leading from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time and from which in turn the ultimate gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the last void which is outside all earths all universes and all matter there would be a guide and a very terrible one a guide who had been an entity of earth millions of years before when man was undreamed of and when forgotten shapes moved on a steaming planet building strange cities among whose last crumbling ruins the first mammals were to play carter remembered what the monstrous necronomicon had vaguely and disconcertingly adumbrated concerning that guide and while there are those the mad arab had written who have dared to seek glimpses beyond the veil and to accept him as guide they would have been more prudent had they avoided commerce with him for it is written in the book of thoth how terrific is the price of a single glimpse nor may those who pass ever return, for in the vastnesses transcending our world are shapes of darkness that seize and bind.

The affair that shambleth about in the night, the evil that defieth the elder sign, the herd that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have, and that thrive on that which groweth out of the tenets thereof, all these blacknesses are lesser than he who guardeth the gateway.

he who will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the abyss of unnameable devourers for he is umrat taweel the most ancient one which the scribe rendereth as the prolonged of life memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos but carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness but rather some vast reality ineffable and undimensioned which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping for no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know there floated before carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which he somehow linked with earth's primal aeon forgotten past monstrous living things moved deliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork that no sane dream ever held and landscapes bore incredible vegetation and cliffs and mountains and masonry of no human pattern there were cities under the sea and denizens thereof and towers and great deserts where globes and cylinders and nameless winged entities shot off into space or hurtled down out of space all this carter grasped though the images bore no fixed relation to one another or to him he himself had no stable form or position but only such shifting hints of form and position as his whirling fancy supplied he had wished to find the enchanted regions of his boyhood dreams where galleys sail up the river past the gilded spires of thrawn and the elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles and cled beyond forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns that sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon

So evil they be, that the land which under they lie doth become strangely polluted, and the very soil doth crawl, and strangely be the things which grow thereon.

Alhazred in his chronicle hath avowed that whomsoever be attracted unto them by the nefarious influence which they project when invoked doth remain forever a part of them, not dead, but new and oddly bodied, instructing the very ground and adding to the power of them.

Also hath Alhazred said, evil the mind Which is held by no head, and ire is the ground which For the moment I stopped reading there, and my eyes skipped over to the next page, where Bruce seemed to have underlined several of the statements as if they were of the utmost importance.

I read that passage carefully.

But some there be among them which wait restless and impatient for the time.

But it is told of in whispers around campfires, and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why.

It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred, the mad poet, dreamed of, the night before he sang his unexplained couplet, That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons death may die.

I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales, but seen by no living man.

Yet I defied them, and went into the untrodden waste with my camel.

It was not allied to the European witch cult and was virtually unknown beyond its members.

No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinaman said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet, That is not dead, which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult.

Castro apparently had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret.

There is no legend so old as to give it a name or to recall that it was ever alive, but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandmams in the tents of sheiks, so that all tribes shun it without wholly knowing why.

It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred, the mad poet, dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet, That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die.

I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel.

I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine, why no other man shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows.

I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it, I was still holding it above me as if it were ablaze.

I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far ancient and forbidden places.

In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of demonic lore, sentences from Alhazred the Mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascus, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz.

I repeated queer extracts and muttered of Afrasiab and the demons that floated with him down the Oxus, later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales, the unreveberate blackness of the abyss.