The Call of Cthulhu | Page 5

hideous were the rites connected
with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a
dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than
even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart
from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured
members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety
of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place
the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its
fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his
offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the
assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost
no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose
utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so
potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of
sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even

thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of
unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close
and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of
exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely
anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a
mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on
hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which
seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a
somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular
block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of
the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the
centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind
legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down
toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent
forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge
fore paws which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The aspect of
the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because
its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable
age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known
type of art belonging to civilisation's youth - or indeed to any other
time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the
soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and
striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The
characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present,
despite a representation of half the world's expert learning in this field,
could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship.
They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly
remote and distinct from mankind as we know it. something frightfully
suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and
our conceptions have no part.
And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed
defeat at the Inspector's problem, there was one man in that gathering
who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and
writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle

he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor
of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight
note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a
tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions
which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland
coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux
whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its
deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which
other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with
shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons
before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human
sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a
supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken
a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest,
expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just
now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished,
and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice
cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone,
comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as
he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the
bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled
members, proved doubly