Lovecraft, H P & Heald, Hazel - Out Of The Aeons

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Out of the Aeons

by H. P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald

Written 1933

(Ms. found among the effects of the late Richard H. Johnson, Ph.D., curator of the Cabot

Museum of Archaeology, Boston, Mass.)

It is not likely that anyone in Boston - or any alert reader elsewhere - will ever forget the

strange affair of the Cabot Museum. The newspaper publicity given to that hellish

mummy, the antique and terrible rumours vaguely linked with it, the morbid wave of

interest and cult activities during 1932, and the frightful fate of the two intruders on

December 1st of that year, all combined to form one of those classic mysteries which go

down for generations as folklore and become the nuclei of whole cycles of horrific

speculation.

Everyone seems to realise, too, that something very vital and unutterably hideous was

suppressed in the public accounts of the culminant horrors. Those first disquieting hints

as to the condition of one of the two bodies were dismissed and ignored too abruptly - nor

were the singular modifications in the mummy given the following-up which their news

value would normally prompt. It also struck people as queer that the mummy was never

restored to its case. In these days of expert taxidermy the excuse that its disintegrating

condition made exhibition impracticable seemed a peculiarly lame one.

As curator of the museum I am in a position to reveal all the suppressed facts, but this I

shall not do during my lifetime. There are things about the world and universe which it is

better for the majority not to know, and I have not departed from the opinion in which all

of us - museum staff, physicians, reporters, and police - concurred at the period of the

horror itself. At the same time it seems proper that a matter of such overwhelming

scientific and historic importance should not remain wholly unrecorded - hence this

account which I have prepared for the benefit of serious students. I shall place it among

various papers to be examined after my death, leaving its fate to the discretion of my

executors. Certain threats and unusual events during the past weeks have led me to

believe that my life - as well as that of other museum officials - is in some peril through

the enmity of several widespread secret cults of Asiatics, Polynesians, and heterogeneous

mystical devotees; hence it is possible that the work of the executors may not be long

postponed. [Executor's note: Dr. Johnson died suddenly and rather mysteriously of heart-

failure on April 22, 1933. Wentworth Moore, taxidermist of the museum, disappeared

around the middle of the preceding month. On February 18 of the same year Dr. William

Minot, who superintended a dissection connected with the case, was stabbed in the back,

dying the following day.]

The real beginning of the horror, I suppose, was in 1879 - long before my term as curator

- when the museum acquired that ghastly, inexplicable mummy from the Orient Shipping

Company. Its very discovery was monstrous and menacing, for it came from a crypt of

Out of the Aeons

unknown origin and fabulous antiquity on a bit of land suddenly upheaved from the

Pacific's floor.

On May 11, 1878, Capt. Charles Weatherbee of the freighter Eridanus, bound from

Wellington, New Zealand, to Valparaiso, Chile, had sighted a new island unmarked on

any chart and evidently of volcanic origin. It projected quite boldly out of the sea in the

form of a truncated cone. A landing-party under Capt. Weatherbee noted evidences of

long submersion on the rugged slopes which they climbed, while at the summit there

were signs of recent destruction, as by an earthquake. Among the scattered rubble were

massive stones of manifestly artificial shaping, and a little examination disclosed the

presence of some of that prehistoric Cyclopean masonry found on certain Pacific islands

and forming a perpetual archaeological puzzle.

Finally the sailors entered a massive stone crypt - judged to have been part of a much

larger edifice, and to have originally lain far underground - in one corner of which the

frightful mummy crouched. After a short period of virtual panic, caused partly by certain

carvings on the walls, the men were induced to move the mummy to the ship, though it

was only with fear and loathing that they touched it. Close to the body, as if once thrust

into its clothes, was a cylinder of an unknown metal containing a roll of thin, bluish-

white membrane of equally unknown nature, inscribed with peculiar characters in a

greyish, indeterminable pigment. In the centre of the vast stone floor was a suggestion of

a trap-door, but the party lacked apparatus sufficiently powerful to move it.

The Cabot Museum, then newly established, saw the meagre reports of the discovery and

at once took steps to acquire the mummy and the cylinder. Curator Pickman made a

personal trip to Valparaiso and outfitted a schooner to search for the crypt where the

thing had been found, though meeting with failure in this matter. At the recorded position

of the island nothing but the sea's unbroken expanse could be discerned, and the seekers

realised that the same seismic forces which had suddenly thrust the island up had carried

it down again to the watery darkness where it had brooded for untold aeons. The secret of

that immovable trap-door would never be solved. The mummy and the cylinder,

however, remained - and the former was placed on exhibition early in November, 1879,

in the museum's hall of mummies.

The Cabot Museum of Archaeology, which specialises in such remnants of ancient and

unknown civilisations as do not fall within the domain of art, is a small and scarcely

famous institution, though one of high standing in scientific circles. It stands in the heart

of Boston's exclusive Beacon Hill district - in Mt. Vernon Street, near Joy - housed in a

former private mansion with an added wing in the rear, and was a source of pride to its

austere neighbours until the recent terrible events brought it an undesirable notoriety. The

hall of mummies on the western side of the original mansion (which was designed by

Bulfinch and erected in 1819), on the second floor, is justly esteemed by historians and

anthropologists as harbouring the greatest collection of its kind in America. Here may be

found typical examples of Egyptian embalming from the earliest Sakkarah specimens to

the last Coptic attempts of the eighth century; mummies of other cultures, including the

prehistoric Indian specimens recently found in the Aleutian Islands; agonised Pompeian

Out of the Aeons

figures moulded in plaster from tragic hollows in the ruin choking ashes; naturally

mummified bodies from mines and other excavations in all parts of the earth - some

surprised by their terrible entombment in the grotesque postures caused by their last,

tearing death-throes - everything, in short, which any collection of the sort could well be

expected to contain. In 1879, of course, it was much less ample than it is now; yet even

then it was remarkable. But that shocking thing from the primal Cyclopean crypt on an

ephemeral sea-spawned island was always its chief attraction and most impenetrable

mystery.

The mummy was that of a medium-sized man of unknown race, and was cast in a

peculiar crouching posture. The face, half shielded by claw-like hands, had its under jaw

thrust far forward, while the shrivelled features bore an expression of fright so hideous

that few spectators could view them unmoved. The eyes were closed, with lids clamped

down tightly over eyeballs apparently bulging and prominent. Bits of hair and beard

remained, and the colour of the whole was a sort of dull neutral grey. In texture the thing

was half leathery and half stony, forming an insoluble enigma to those experts who

sought to ascertain how it was embalmed. In places bits of its substance were eaten away

by time and decay. Rags of some peculiar fabric, with suggestions of unknown designs,

still clung to the object.

Just what made it so infinitely horrible and repulsive one could hardly say. For one thing,

there was a subtle, indefinable sense of limitless antiquity and utter alienage which

affected one like a view from the brink of a monstrous abyss of unplumbed blackness -

but mostly it was the expression of crazed fear on the puckered, prognathous, half-

shielded face. Such a symbol of infinite, inhuman, cosmic fright could not help

communicating the emotion to the beholder amidst a disquieting cloud of mystery and

vain conjecture.

Among the discriminating few who frequented the Cabot Museum this relic of an elder,

forgotten world soon acquired an unholy fame, though the institution's seclusion and

quiet policy prevented it from becoming a popular sensation of the "Cardiff Giant" sort.

In the last century the art of vulgar ballyhoo had not invaded the field of scholarship to

the extent it has now succeeded in doing. Naturally, savants of various kinds tried their

best to classify the frightful object, though always without success. Theories of a bygone

Pacific civilisation, of which the Easter Island images and the megalithic masonry of

Ponape and Nan-Matol are conceivable vestiges, were freely circulated among students,

and learned journals carried varied and often conflicting speculations on a possible

former continent whose peaks survive as the myriad islands of Melanesia and Polynesia.

The diversity in dates assigned to the hypothetical vanished culture - or continent - was at

once bewildering and amusing; yet some surprisingly relevant allusions were found in

certain myths of Tahiti and other islands.

Meanwhile the strange cylinder and its baffling scroll of unknown hieroglyphs, carefully

preserved in the museum library, received their due share of attention. No question could

exist as to their association with the mummy; hence all realised that in the unravelling of

their mystery the mystery of the shrivelled horror would in all probability be unravelled

Out of the Aeons

as well. The cylinder, about four inches long by seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, was

of a queerly iridescent metal utterly defying chemical analysis and seemingly impervious

to all reagents. It was tightly fitted with a cap of the same substance, and bore engraved

figurings of an evidently decorative and possibly symbolic nature - conventional designs

which seemed to follow a peculiarly alien, paradoxical, and doubtfully describable

system of geometry.

Not less mysterious was the scroll it contained - a neat roll of some thin, bluish-white,

unanalysable membrane, coiled round a slim rod of metal like that of the cylinder, and

unwinding to a length of some two feet. The large, bold hieroglyphs, extending in a

narrow line down the centre of the scroll and penned or painted with a grey pigment

defying analysts, resembled nothing known to linguists and palaeographers, and could

not be deciphered despite the transmission of photographic copies to every living expert

in the given field.

It is true that a few scholars, unusually versed in the literature of occultism and magic,

found vague resemblances between some of the hieroglyphs and certain primal symbols

described or cited in two or three very ancient, obscure, and esoteric texts such as the

Book of Eibon, reputed to descend from forgotten Hyperborea; the Pnakotic fragments,

alleged to be pre-human; and the monstrous and forbidden Necronomicon of the mad

Arab Abdul Alhazred. None of these resemblances, however, was beyond dispute; and

because of the prevailing low estimation of occult studies, no effort was made to circulate

copies of the hieroglyphs among mystical specialists. Had such circulation occurred at

this early date, the later history of the case might have been very different; indeed, a

glance at the hieroglyphs by any reader of von Junzt's horrible Nameless Cults would

have established a linkage of unmistakable significance. At this period, however, the

readers of that monstrous blasphemy were exceedingly few; copies having been

incredibly scarce in the interval between the suppression of the original Dusseldorf

edition (1839) and of the Bridewell translation (1845) and the publication of the

expurgated reprint by the Golden Goblin Press in 1909. Practically speaking, no occultist

or student of the primal past's esoteric lore had his attention called to the strange scroll

until the recent outburst of sensational journalism which precipitated the horrible climax.

II.

Thus matters glided along for a half-century following the installation of the frightful

mummy at the museum. The gruesome object had a local celebrity among cultivated

Bostonians, but no more than that; while the very existence of the cylinder and scroll -

after a decade of futile research - was virtually forgotten. So quiet and conservative was

the Cabot Museum that no reporter or feature writer ever thought of invading its

uneventful precincts for rabble-tickling material.

The invasion of ballyhoo commenced in the spring of 1931, when a purchase of

somewhat spectacular nature - that of the strange objects and inexplicably preserved

bodies found in crypts beneath the almost vanished and evilly famous ruins of Chateau

Faussesflammes, in Averoigne, France - brought the museum prominently into the news

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摘要：

OutoftheAeonsOutoftheAeonsbyH.P.Lovecraft&HazelHealdWritten1933(Ms.foundamongtheeffectsofthelateRichardH.Johnson,Ph.D.,curatoroftheCabotMuseumofArchaeology,Boston,Mass.)ItisnotlikelythatanyoneinBoston-oranyalertreaderelsewhere-willeverforgetthestrangeaffairoftheCabotMuseum.Thenewspaperpublicitygiven...

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