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_Title:_ Imprisoned with the Pharaohs
_Date of first publication:_ 1924
_Author:_ H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
_Date first posted:_ December 6, 2025
_Date last updated:_ December 6, 2025
Faded Page eBook #20251206

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net








[For information on this story, see the Transcriber's Note at the end
of this file]




Imprisoned with the Pharaohs


H. P. LOVECRAFT

(1924, 1965)




Would you believe that this ghostly tale was really ghost-written?
The great magician Harry Houdini dreamed up the plot and told it to
the owner of _Weird Tales_, a magazine that specialized in stories of
the uncanny.  But telling a plot and turning it into a story are two
different things, so Howard Lovecraft was hired to fashion Houdini's
idea into fiction.  It took him only a month to write the story
(which was published under Houdini's name), and he seems to have
enjoyed doing it.  He wrote in a letter to a friend: "I went the
limit in descriptive realism in the first part.  Then when I buckled
down to the under-the-pyramid stuff, I let myself loose and coughed
up some of the most nameless, slithering, unmentionable HORROR that
ever stalked cloven-hooved through the abysses of elder night."



_Imprisoned with the Pharaohs_

Mystery attracts mystery.  Ever since the wide appearance of my name
as a performer of unexplained feats, I have encountered strange
narratives and events which my calling has led people to link with my
interests and activities.  Some of these have been trivial and
irrelevant, some deeply dramatic and absorbing, some productive of
weird and perilous experiences, and some involving me in extensive
scientific and historical research.  Many of these matters I have
told and shall continue to tell very freely; but there is one of
which I speak with great reluctance, and which I am now relating only
after a session of grilling persuasion from the publishers of this
magazine, who had heard vague rumors of it from other members of my
family.

The hitherto guarded subject pertains to my nonprofessional visit to
Egypt fourteen years ago, and has been avoided by me for several
reasons.  For one thing, I am averse to exploiting certain
unmistakably actual facts and conditions obviously unknown to the
myriad tourists who throng about the pyramids and apparently secreted
with much diligence by the authorities at Cairo, who cannot be wholly
ignorant of them.  For another thing, I dislike to recount an
incident in which my own fantastic imagination must have played so
great a part.  What I saw--or thought I saw--certainly did not take
place; but is rather to be viewed as a result of my then recent
readings in Egyptology, and of the speculations anent this theme
which my environment naturally prompted.  These imaginative stimuli,
magnified by the excitement of an actual event terrible enough in
itself, undoubtedly gave rise to the culminating horror of that
grotesque night so long past.

In January, 1910, I had finished a professional engagement in England
and signed a contract for a tour of Australian theatres.  A liberal
time being allowed for the trip, I determined to make the most of it
in the sort of travel which chiefly interests me; so accompanied by
my wife I drifted pleasantly down the Continent and embarked at
Marseilles on the P. & O. Steamer _Malwa_, bound for Port Said.  From
that point I proposed to visit the principal historical localities of
lower Egypt before leaving finally for Australia.

The voyage was an agreeable one, and enlivened by many of the amusing
incidents which befall a magical performer apart from his work.  I
had intended, for the sake of quiet travel, to keep my name a secret;
but was goaded into betraying myself by a fellow-magician whose
anxiety to astound the passengers with ordinary tricks tempted me to
duplicate and exceed his feats in a manner quite destructive of my
incognito.  I mention this because of its ultimate effect--an effect
I should have foreseen before unmasking to a shipload of tourists
about to scatter throughout the Nile Valley.  What it did was to
herald my identity wherever I subsequently went, and deprive my wife
and me of all the placid inconspicuousness we had sought.  Traveling
to seek curiosities, I was often forced to stand inspection as a sort
of curiosity myself!

We had come to Egypt in search of the picturesque and the mystically
impressive, but found little enough when the ship edged up to Port
Said and discharged its passengers in small boats.  Low dunes of
sand, bobbing buoys in shallow water, and a drearily European small
town with nothing of interest save the great De Lesseps statue, made
us anxious to get on to something more worth our while.  After some
discussion we decided to proceed at once to Cairo and the Pyramids,
later going to Alexandria for the Australian boat and for whatever
Greco-Roman sights that ancient metropolis might present.

The railway journey was tolerable enough, and consumed only four
hours and a half.  We saw much of the Suez Canal, whose route we
followed as far as Ismailiya and later had a taste of Old Egypt in
our glimpse of the restored freshwater canal of the Middle Empire.
Then at last we saw Cairo glimmering through the growing dusk; a
winkling constellation which became a blaze as we halted at the great
Gare Centrale.

But once more disappointment awaited us, for all that we beheld was
European save the costumes and the crowds.  A prosaic subway led to a
square teeming with carriages, taxicabs, and trolley-cars and
gorgeous with electric lights shining on tall buildings; whilst the
very theatre where I was vainly requested to play and which I later
attended as a spectator, had recently been renamed the American
Cosmograph.  We stopped at Shepheard's Hotel, reached in a taxi that
sped along broad, smartly built-up streets; and, amidst the perfect
service of its restaurant, elevators, and generally Anglo-American
luxuries, the mysterious East and immemorial past seemed very far
away.

The next day, however, precipitated us delightfully into the heart of
the _Arabian Nights_ atmosphere; and in the winding ways and exotic
skyline of Cairo, the Bagdad of Harun-al-Rashid seemed to live again.
Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens
along the Mouski in quest of the native quarter, and were soon in the
hands of a clamorous cicerone [tour guide] who--notwithstanding later
developments--was assuredly a master at his trade.

Not until afterward did I see that I should have applied at the hotel
for a licensed guide.  This man, a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced,
and relatively cleanly fellow who looked like a Pharaoh and called
himself Abdul Reis el Drogman, appeared to have much power over
others of his kind; though subsequently the police professed not to
know him, and to suggest that _reis_ is merely a name for any person
in authority, whilst 'Drogman' is obviously no more than a clumsy
modification of the word for a leader of tourist parties--_dragoman_.

Abdul led us among such wonders as we had before only read and
dreamed of.  Old Cairo is itself a story-book and a dream--labyrinths
of narrow alleys redolent of aromatic secrets; Arabesque balconies
and oriels nearly meeting above the cobbled streets; maelstroms of
Oriental traffic with strange cries, cracking whips, rattling carts,
jingling money, and braying donkeys; kaleidoscopes of polychrome
robes, veils, turbans, and tarbushes; water-carriers and dervishes;
dogs and cats; soothsayers and barbers; and over all the whining of
blind beggars crouched in alcoves, and the sonorous chanting of
muezzins from minarets limned delicately against a sky of deep,
unchanging blue.

The roofed, quieter bazaars were hardly less alluring.  Spice,
perfume, incense, beads, rugs, silks, and brass.  Old Mahomoud
Suleiman squats cross-legged amidst his gummy bottles while
chattering youths pulverize mustard in the hollowed-out capital of an
ancient classic column; a Roman Corinthian, perhaps from neighboring
Heliopolis, where Augustus stationed one of his three Egyptian
legions.  Antiquity begins to mingle with exoticism.  And then the
mosques and the museum--we saw them all, and tried not to let our
Arabian revel succumb to the darker charm of Pharaonic Egypt which
the museum's priceless treasures offered.  That was to be our climax,
and for the present we concentrated on the mediaeval Saracenic
glories of the Califs whose magnificent tomb-mosques form a
glittering faery necropolis on the edge of the Arabian Desert.

At length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed Ali to the ancient
mosque of Sultan Hassan, and the tower-flanked Babel-Azab, beyond
which climbs the steep-walled pass to the mighty citadel that Saladin
himself built with the stones of forgotten pyramids.  It was sunset
when we scaled that cliff, circled the modern mosque of Mohammed Ali,
and looked down from the dizzy parapet over mystic Cairo--mystic
Cairo all golden with its carven domes, its ethereal minarets and its
flaming gardens.

Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum; and
beyond it--across the cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of eons
and dynasties--lurked the menacing sands of the Libyan Desert,
undulant and iridescent and evil with older arcana.

The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk;
and as it stood poised on the world's rim like that ancient god of
Heliopolis--Re-Harakhte, the Horizon-Sun--we saw silhouetted against
its vermeil holocaust the black outlines of the Pyramids of
Gizeh--the palaeogean tombs there were hoary with a thousand years
when Tut-Ankh-Amen mounted his golden throne in distant Thebes.  Then
we knew that we were done with Saracen Cairo, and that we must taste
the deeper mysteries of primal Egypt--the black Kern of Re and Amen,
Isis and Osiris.

The next morning we visited the Pyramids, riding out in a Victoria
across the island of Chizereh with its massive lebbakh trees, and the
smaller English bridge to the western shore.  Down the shore road we
drove, between great rows of lebbakhs and past the vast Zoological
Gardens to the suburb of Gizeh, where a new bridge to Cairo proper
has since been built.  Then, turning inland along the
Sharia-el-Haram, we crossed a region of glassy canals and shabby
native villages till before us loomed the objects of our quest,
cleaving the mists of roadside pools.  Forty centuries, as Napoleon
had told his campaigners there, indeed looked down upon us.

The road now rose abruptly, till we finally reached our place of
transfer between the trolley station and the Mena House Hotel.  Abdul
Reis, who capably purchased our Pyramid tickets, seemed to have an
understanding with the crowding, yelling, and offensive Bedouins who
inhabited a squalid mud village some distance away and pestiferously
assailed every traveller; for he kept them very decently at bay and
secured an excellent pair of camels for us, himself mounting a donkey
and assigning the leadership of our animals to a group of men and
boys more expensive than useful.  The area to be traversed was so
small that camels were hardly needed, but we did not regret adding to
our experience this troublesome form of desert navigation.

The Pyramids stand on a high rock plateau, this group forming next to
the northernmost of the series of regal and aristocratic cemeteries
built in the neighbourhood of the extinct capital Memphis which lay
on the same side of the Nile, somewhat south of Gizeh, and which
flourished between 3400 and 2000 B.C.  The greatest Pyramid, which
lies nearest the modern road, was built by King Cheops or Khufu about
2800 B.C. and stands more than 450 feet in perpendicular height.  In
a line southwest from this are successively the Second Pyramid, built
a generation later by King Khephren, and though slightly smaller,
looking even larger because set on higher ground, and the radically
smaller Third Pyramid of King Mycerinus, built about 2700 B.C.  Near
the edge of the plateau and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a
face probably altered to form a colossal portrait of Khephren, its
royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx--mute, sardonic, and wise
beyond mankind and memory.

Minor Pyramids and the traces of ruined minor Pyramids are found in
several places, and the whole plateau is pitted with the tombs of
dignitaries of less than royal rank.  These latter were originally
marked by _mastabas_, or stone benchlike structures about the deep
burial shafts, as found in other Memphian cemeteries and exemplified
by Perneb's Tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of New York.  At Gizeh,
however, all such visible things have been swept away by time and
pillage; and only the rock-hewn shafts, either sand-filled or cleared
out by archaeologists, remain to attest their former existence.
Connected with each tomb was a chapel in which priests and relatives
offered food and prayer to the hovering _ka_ or vital principle of
the deceased.  The small tombs have their chapels contained in their
stone _mastabas_ or superstructures, but the mortuary chapels of the
Pyramids, where regal Pharaohs lay, were separate temples, each to
the east of its corresponding Pyramid, and connected by a causeway to
a massive gate-chapel or propylon at the edge of the rock plateau.

The gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid, nearly buried in the
drifting sands, yawns subterraneously southeast of the Sphinx.
Persistent tradition dubs it the "Temple of the Sphinx"; and it may
perhaps be rightly called such if the Sphinx indeed represents the
Second Pyramid's builder Khephren.  There are unpleasant tales of the
Sphinx before Khephren, but whatever its elder features were, the
monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the
colossus without fear.

It was in the great gateway-temple that the life-size diorite statue
of Khephren now in the Cairo museum was found; a statue before which
I stood in awe when I beheld it.  Whether the whole edifice is now
excavated I am not certain, but in 1910 most of it was below ground,
with the entrance heavily barred at night.  Germans were in charge of
the work, and the war or other things may have stopped them.  I would
give much, in view of my experience and of certain Bedouin
whisperings discredited or unknown in Cairo, to know what has
developed in connection with a certain well in a transverse gallery
where statues of the Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to
the statues of baboons.

The road, as we traversed it on our camels that morning, curved
sharply past the wooden police quarters, post office, drug store, and
shops on the left, and plunged south and east in a complete bend that
scaled the rock plateau and brought us face to face with the desert
under the lee of the Great Pyramid.  Past Cyclopean masonry we rode,
rounding the eastern face and looking down ahead into a valley of
minor Pyramids beyond which the eternal Nile glistened to the east,
and the eternal desert shimmered to the west.  Very close loomed the
three major Pyramids, the greatest devoid of outer casing and showing
its bulk of great stones, but the others retaining here and there the
neatly fitted covering which had made them smooth and finished in
their day.

Presently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the
spell of those terrible unseeing eyes.  On the vast stone breast we
faintly discerned the emblem of Re-Harakhte, for whose image the
Sphinx was mistaken in a late dynasty; and though sand covered the
tablet between the great paws, we recalled what Thutmosis IV
inscribed thereon, and the dream he had when a prince.  It was then
that the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us
wonder about the legends of subterranean passages beneath the
monstrous creature, leading down, down, to depths none might dare
hint at--depths connected with mysteries older than the dynastic
Egypt we excavate, and having a sinister relation to the persistence
of abnormal, animal-headed gods in the ancient Nilotic pantheon.
Then, too, it was I asked myself an idle question whose hideous
significance was not to appear for many an hour.


Other tourists now began to overtake us, and we moved on to the
sand-choked Temple of the Sphinx, fifty yards to the southeast, which
I have previously mentioned as the great gate of the causeway to the
Second Pyramid's mortuary chapel on the plateau.  Most of it was
still underground, and although we dismounted and descended through a
modern passageway to its alabaster corridor and pillared hall, I felt
that Abdul and the local German attendant had not shown us all there
was to see.

After this we made the conventional circuit of the Pyramid plateau,
examining the Second Pyramid and the peculiar ruins of its mortuary
chapel to the east, the Third Pyramid and its miniature southern
satellites and ruined eastern chapel, the rock tombs and the
honeycombings of the Fourth and Fifth dynasties, and the famous
Campbell's Tomb whose shadowy shaft sinks precipitously for
fifty-three feet to a sinister sarcophagus which one of our camel
drivers divested of the cumbering sand after a vertiginous descent by
rope.

Cries now assailed us from the Great Pyramid, where Bedouins were
besieging a party of tourists with offers of speed in the performance
of solitary trips up and down.  Seventy minutes is said to be the
record for such an ascent and descent, but many lusty sheiks and sons
of sheiks assured us they could cut it five if given the requisite
impetus of liberal _baksheesh_.  They did not get this impetus,
though we did let Abdul take us up, thus obtaining a view of
unprecedented magnificence which included not only remote and
glittering Cairo with its crowned citadel background of gold-violet
hills, but all the Pyramids of the Memphian district as well, from
Abu Roash on the north to the Dashur on the south.  The Sakkara step
Pyramid, which marks the evolution of the low _mastaba_ into the true
Pyramid, showed clearly and alluringly in the sandy distance.  It is
close to this transition-monument that the famed tomb of Perneb was
found--more than four hundred miles north of the Theban rock valley
where Tut-Ankh-Amen sleeps.  Again I was forced to silence through
sheer awe.  The prospect of such antiquity, and the secrets each
hoary monument seemed to hold and brood over, filled me with a
reverence and sense of immensity nothing else ever gave me.

Fatigued by our climb, and disgusted with the importunate Bedouins
whose actions seemed to defy every rule of taste, we omitted the
arduous detail of entering the cramped interior passages of any of
the Pyramids, though we saw several of the hardiest tourists
preparing for the suffocating crawl through Cheops' mightiest
memorial.  As we dismissed and overpaid our local bodyguard and drove
back to Cairo with Abdul Reis under the afternoon sun, we half
regretted the omission we had made.  Such fascinating things were
whispered about lower Pyramid passages not in the guide books;
passages whose entrances had been hastily blocked up and concealed by
certain uncommunicative archaeologists who had found and begun to
explore them.

Of course, this whispering was largely baseless on the face of it;
but it was curious to reflect how persistently visitors were
forbidden to enter the Pyramids at night, or to visit the lowest
burrows and crypt of the Great Pyramid.  Perhaps in the latter case
it was the psychological effect which was feared--the effort on the
visitor of feeling himself huddled down beneath a gigantic world of
solid masonry; joined to the life he has known by the merest tube, in
which he may only crawl, and which any accident or evil design might
block.  The whole subject seemed so weird and alluring that we
resolved to pay the Pyramid plateau another visit at the earliest
possible opportunity.  For me this opportunity came much earlier than
I expected.

That evening, the members of our party feeling somewhat tired after
the strenuous program of the day, I went alone with Abdul Reis for a
walk through the picturesque Arab quarter.  Though I had seen it by
day, I wished to study the alleys and bazaars in the dusk, when rich
shadows and mellow gleams of light would add to their glamor and
fantastic illusion.  The native crowds were thinning, but were still
very noisy and numerous when we came upon a knot of reveling Bedouins
in the Suken-Nahhasin, or bazaar of the coppersmiths.  Their
apparent leader, an insolent youth with heavy features and saucily
cocked tarbush, took some notice of us, and evidently recognized with
no great friendliness my competent but admittedly supercilious and
sneeringly disposed guide.

Perhaps, I thought, he resented that odd reproduction of the Sphinx's
half-smile which I had often remarked with amused irritation; or
perhaps he did not like the hollow and sepulchral resonance of
Adbul's voice.  At any rate, the exchange of ancestrally opprobrious
language became very brisk; and before long Ali Ziz, as I heard the
stranger called when called by no worse name, began to pull violently
at Abdul's robe, an action quickly reciprocated and leading to a
spirited scuffle in which both combatants lost their sacredly
cherished headgear and would have reached an even direr condition had
I not intervened and separated them by main force.

My interference, at first seemingly unwelcome on both sides,
succeeded at last in effecting a truce.  Sullenly each belligerent
composed his wrath and his attire, and with an assumption of dignity
as profound as it was sudden, the two formed a curious pact of honor
which I soon learned is a custom of great antiquity in Cairo--a pact
for the settlement of their difference by means of a nocturnal fist
fight atop the Great Pyramid, long after the departure of the last
moonlight sightseer.  Each duellist was to assemble a party of
seconds, and the affair was to begin at midnight, proceeding by
rounds in the most civilized possible fashion.

In all this planning there was much which excited my interests.  The
fight itself promised to be unique and spectacular while the thought
of the scene on that hoary pile overlooking the antediluvian plateau
of Gizeh under the wan moon of the pallid small hours appealed to
every fiber of imagination in me.  A request found Abdul exceedingly
willing to admit me to his party of seconds; so that all the rest of
the early evening I accompanied him to various dens in the most
lawless regions of the town--mostly northeast of the Ezbekiyeh--where
he gathered one by one a select and formidable band of congenial
cutthroats at his pugilistic background.

Shortly after nine our party, mounted on donkeys bearing such royal
or tourist-reminiscent names as "Rameses," "Mark Twain," "J. P.
Morgan," and "Minnehaha," edged through street labyrinths both
Oriental and Occidental, crossed the muddy and mast-forested Nile by
the bridge of the bronze lions, and cantered philosophically between
the lebbakhs on the road to Gizeh.  Slightly over two hours were
consumed by the trip, toward the end of which we passed the last of
the returning tourists, saluted the last inbound trolley-car, and
were alone with the night and the past and the spectral moon.

Then we saw the vast Pyramids at the end of the avenue, ghoulish with
a dim atavistical menace which I had not seemed to notice in the
daytime.  Even the smallest of them held a hint of the ghastly--for
was it not in this that they had buried Queen Nitocris alive in the
Sixth Dynasty; subtle Queen Nitocris who once invited all her enemies
to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening
the water-gates?  I recalled that the Arabs whisper things about
Nitocris, and shun the Third Pyramid at certain phases of the moon.
It must have been over her that Thomas Moore was brooding when he
wrote a thing muttered about by Memphian boatmen:

  The subterranean nymph that dwells
  'Mid sunless gems and glories hid--
  The lady of the Pyramid!'


Early as we were, Ali Ziz and his party were ahead of us; for we saw
their donkeys outlined against the desert plateau at Kafrel-Harem;
toward which squalid Arab settlements, close to the Sphinx, we had
diverged instead of following the regular road to the Mena House,
where some of the sleepy, inefficient police might have observed and
halted us.  Here, where filthy Bedouins stabled camels and donkeys in
the rock tombs of Khephren's courtiers, we were led up the rocks and
over the sand to the Great Pyramid, up whose time-worn sides the
Arabs swarmed eagerly; Abdul Reis offering me the assistance I did
not need.

As most travelers know, the actual apex of this structure has long
been worn away, leaving a reasonably flat platform twelve yards
square.  On this eery pinnacle a squared circle was formed, and in a
few moments the sardonic desert moon leered down upon a battle which,
but for the quality of the ringside cries, might well have occurred
at some minor athletic club in America.  As I watched it, I felt that
some of our less desirable institutions were not lacking; for every
blow, feint, and defense bespoke "stalling" to my not inexperienced
eye.  It was quickly over, and despite my misgivings as to methods I
felt a sort of proprietary pride when Abdul Reis was adjudged the
winner.

Reconciliation was phenomenally rapid, and amidst the singing,
fraternizing, and drinking which followed, I found it difficult to
realize that a quarrel had ever occurred.  Oddly enough, I myself
seemed to be more a center of notice than the antagonists; and from
my smattering of Arabic I judged that they were discussing my
professional performances and escapes from every sort of manacle and
confinement, in a manner which indicated not only a surprising
knowledge of me, but a distinct hostility and skepticism concerning
my feats of escape.  It gradually dawned on me that the elder magic
of Egypt did not depart without leaving traces, and that fragments of
a strange secret lore and priestly cult-practises have survived
surreptitiously amongst the fellaheen to such an extent that the
prowess of a strange hahwi or magician is resented and disputed.  I
thought of how much my hollow-voiced guide Abdul Reis looked like an
old Egyptian priest or Pharaoh or smiling Sphinx ... and wondered.

Suddenly something happened which in a flash proved the correctness
of my reflection and made me curse the denseness whereby I had
accepted this night's events as other than the empty and malicious
"frame-up" they now showed themselves to be.  Without warning, and
doubtless in answer to some subtle sign from Abdul, the entire band
of Bedouins precipitated itself upon me; and having produced heavy
ropes, soon had me bound as securely as I was ever bound in the
course of my life, either on the stage or off.

I struggled at first, but soon saw that one man could make no headway
against a band of over twenty sinewy barbarians.  My hands were tied
behind my back, my knees bent to their fullest extent, and my wrists
and ankles stoutly linked together with unyielding cords.  A stifling
gag was forced into my mouth, and a blindfold fastened tightly over
my eyes.  Then, as Arabs bore me aloft on their shoulders and began a
jouncing descent of the Pyramid, I heard the taunts of my late guide
Abdul, who mocked and jeered delightedly in his hollow voice, and
assured me that I was soon to have my "magic powers" put to a supreme
test which would quickly remove any egotism I might have gained
through triumphing over all the tests offered by America and Europe.
Egypt, he reminded me, is very old, and full of inner mysteries and
antique powers not even conceivable to the experts of today, whose
devices had so uniformly failed to entrap me.

How far or in what direction I was carried, I cannot tell; for the
circumstances were all against the formation of any accurate
judgment.  I know, however, that it could not have been a great
distance; since my bearers at no point hastened beyond a walk, yet
kept me aloft a surprisingly short time.  It is this perplexing
brevity which makes me feel almost like shuddering whenever I think
of Gizeh and its plateau--for one is oppressed by hints of the
closeness to everyday tourist routes of what existed then and must
exist still.

The evil abnormality I speak of did not become manifest at first.
Setting me down on a surface which I recognized as sand rather than
rock, my captors passed a rope around my chest and dragged me a few
feet to a ragged opening in the ground, into which they presently
lowered me with much rough handling.  For apparent eons I bumped
against the stony irregular sides of a narrow hewn well which I took
to be one of the numerous burial-shafts of the plateau until the
prodigious, almost incredible depth of it robbed me of all bases of
conjecture.

The horror of the experience deepened with every dragging second.
That any descent through the sheer solid rock could be so vast
without reaching the core of the planet itself, or that any rope made
by man could be so long as to dangle me in these unholy and seemingly
fathomless profundities of nether earth, were beliefs of such
grotesqueness that it was easier to doubt my agitated senses than to
accept them.  Even now I am uncertain, for I know how deceitful the
sense of time becomes when one is removed or distorted.  But I am
quite sure that I preserved a logical consciousness that far; that at
least I did not add any full-grown phantoms of imagination to a
picture hideous enough in its reality, and explicable by a type of
cerebral illusion vastly short of actual hallucination.

All this was not the cause of my first bit of fainting.  The shocking
ordeal was cumulative, and the beginning of the latter terrors was a
very perceptible increase in my rate of descent.  They were paying
out that infinitely long rope very swiftly now, and I scraped cruelly
against the rough and constricted sides of the shaft as I shot madly
downward.  My clothing was in tatters, and I felt the trickle of
blood all over, even above the mounting and excruciating pain.  My
nostrils, too, were assailed by a scarcely definable menace: a
creeping odor of damp and staleness curiously unlike anything I had
ever smelled before, and having faint overtones of spice and incense
that lent an element of mockery.

Then the mental cataclysm came.  It was horrible--hideous beyond all
articulate description because it was all of the soul, with nothing
of detail to describe.  It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the
summation of the fiendish.  The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and
demoniac--one moment I was plunging agonizingly down that narrow well
of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on
bat-wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swoopingly through
illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to
measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to
sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua....  Thank God for
the mercy that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies of
consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore harpylike at
my spirit!  That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength
and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic
that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead.



II

It was very gradually that I regained my senses after that eldritch
flight through stygian space.  The process was infinitely painful,
and colored by fantastic dreams in which my bound and gagged
condition found singular embodiment.  The precise nature of these
dreams was very clear while I was experiencing them, but became
blurred in my recollection almost immediately afterward, and was soon
reduced to the merest outline by the terrible events--real or
imaginary--which followed.  I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a
great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which had
reached out of the earth to crush and engulf me.  And when I stopped
to reflect what the paw was, it seemed to me that it was Egypt.  In
the dream I looked back at the events of the preceding weeks, and saw
myself lured and enmeshed little by little, subtly and insidiously,
by some hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery; some spirit
that was in Egypt before ever man was, and that will be when man is
no more.

I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly
alliance it has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead.  I
saw phantom processions of priests with the heads of bulls, falcons,
cats, and ibises; phantom processions marching interminably through
subterraneous labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylaea beside
which a man is as a fly, and offering unnameable sacrifice to
indescribable gods.  Stone colossi marched in endless night and drove
herds of grinning andro-sphinxes down to the shores of illimitable
stagnant rivers of pitch.  And behind it all I saw the ineffable
malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling
greedily after me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had
dared to mock it by emulation.

In my sleeping brain there took shape a melodrama of sinister hatred
and pursuit, and I saw the black soul of Egypt singling me out and
calling me in inaudible whispers; calling and luring me, leading me
on with the glitter and glamor of a Saracenic surface, but ever
pulling me down to the age-mad catacombs and horrors of its dead and
abysmal pharaonic heart.

Then the dream faces took on human resemblances, and I saw my guide
Abdul Reis in the robes of a king, with the sneer of the Sphinx on
his features.  And I knew that those features were the features of
Khephren the Great, who raised the Second Pyramid, carved over the
Sphinx's face in the likeness of his own and built that titanic
gateway temple whose myriad corridors the archaeologists think they
have dug out of the cryptical sand and the uninformative rock.  And I
looked at the long, lean, rigid hand of Khephren; the long, lean,
rigid hand as I had seen it on the diorite statue in the Cairo
Museum--the statue they had found in the terrible gateway temple--and
wondered that I had not shrieked when I saw it on Abdul Reis....
That hand?  It was hideously cold, and it was crushing me; it was the
cold and cramping of the sarcophagus ... the chill and constriction
of unrememberable Egypt....  It was nighted, necropolitan Egypt
itself ... that yellow paw ... and they whisper such things of
Khephren....

But at this juncture I began to awake--or at least, to assume a
condition less completely that of sleep than the one just preceding.
I recalled the fight atop the Pyramid, the treacherous Bedouins and
their attack, my frightful descent by rope through endless rock
depths, and my mad swinging and plunging in a chill void redolent of
aromatic putrescence.  I perceived that I now lay on a damp rock
floor, and that my bonds were still biting into me with unloosened
force.  It was very cold, and I seemed to detect a faint current of
noisesome air sweeping across me.  The cuts and bruises I had
received from the jagged sides of the rock shaft were paining me
woefully, their soreness enhanced to a stinging or burning acuteness
by some pungent quality in the faint draft, and the mere act of
rolling over was enough to set my whole frame throbbing with untold
agony.

As I turned I felt a tug from above, and concluded that the rope
whereby I was lowered still reached to the surface.  Whether or not
the Arabs still held it, I had no idea; nor had I any idea how far
within the earth I was.  I knew that the darkness around me was
wholly or nearly total, since no ray of moonlight penetrated my
blindfold; but I did not trust my senses enough to accept as evidence
of extreme depth the sensation of vast duration which had
characterized my descent.

Knowing at least that I was in a space of considerable extent,
reached from the surface directly above by an opening in the rock, I
doubtfully conjectured that my prison was perhaps the buried gateway
chapel of old Khephren--the Temple of the Sphinx--perhaps some inner
corridor which the guides had not shown me during my morning visit,
and from which I might easily escape if I could find my way to the
barred entrance.  It would be a labyrinthine wandering, but no worse
than others out of which I had in the past found my way.

The first step was to get free of my bonds, gag, and blindfold; and
this I knew would be no great task, since subtler experts than these
Arabs had tried every known species of fetter upon me during my long
and varied career as an exponent of escape, yet had never succeeded
in defeating my methods.

Then it occurred to me that the Arabs might be ready to meet and
attack me at the entrance upon any evidence of my probable escape
from the binding cords, as would be furnished by any decided
agitation of the rope which they probably held.  This, of course, was
taking for granted that my place of confinement was indeed Khephren's
Temple of the Sphinx.  The direct opening in the roof, wherever it
might lurk, could not be beyond easy reach of the ordinary modern
entrance near the Sphinx; if in truth it were any great distance at
all on the surface, since the total area known to visitors is not at
all enormous.  I had not noticed any such opening during my daytime
pilgrimage, but knew that these things are easily overlooked amidst
the drifting sands.

Thinking these matters over as I lay bent and bound on the rock
floor, I nearly forgot the horrors of abysmal descent and cavernous
swinging which had so lately reduced me to a coma.  My present
thought was only to outwit the Arabs, and I accordingly determined to
work myself free as quickly as possible, avoiding any tug on the
descending line which might betray an effective or even problematical
attempt at freedom.

This, however, was more easily determined than effected.  A few
preliminary trials made it clear that little could be accomplished
without considerable motion; and it did not surprise me when, after
one especially energetic struggle, I began to feel the coils of
falling rope as they piled up about me and upon me.  Obviously, I
thought, the Bedouins had felt my movements and released their end of
the rope; hastening no doubt to the temple's true entrance to lie
murderously in wait for me.

The prospect was not pleasing--but I had faced worse in my time
without flinching, and would not flinch now.  At present I must first
of all free myself of bonds, then trust to ingenuity to escape from
the temple unharmed.  It is curious how implicitly I had come to
believe myself in the old temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx, only
a short distance below the ground.

The belief was shattered, and every pristine apprehension of
preternatural depth and demoniac mystery revived, by a circumstance
which grew in horror and significance even as I formulated my
philosophical plan.  I have said that the falling rope was piling up
about and upon me.  Now I saw that it was continuing to pile, as no
rope of normal length could possibly do.  It gained in momentum and
became an avalanche of hemp, accumulating mountainously on the floor
and half burying me beneath its swiftly multiplying coils.  Soon I
was completely engulfed and gasping for breath as the increasing
convolutions submerged and stifled me.

My senses tottered again, and I vainly tried to fight off a menace
desperate and ineluctable.  It was not merely that I was tortured
beyond human endurance--not merely that life and breath seemed to be
crushed slowly out of me--it was the knowledge of what those
unnatural lengths of rope implied, and the consciousness of what
unknown and incalculable gulfs of inner earth must at this moment be
surrounding me.  My endless descent and swinging flight through
goblin space, then, must have been real, and even now I must be lying
helpless in some nameless cavern world toward the core of the planet.
Such a sudden confirmation of ultimate horror was insupportable, and
a second time I lapsed into merciful oblivion.

When I say oblivion, I do not imply that I was free from dreams.  On
the contrary, my absence from the conscious world was marked by
visions of the most unutterable hideousness.  God! ... If only I had
not read so much Egyptology before coming to this land which is the
fountain of all darkness and terror!  This second spell of fainting
filled my sleeping mind anew with shivering realization of the
country and its archaic secrets, and through some damnable chance my
dreams turned to the ancient notions of the dead and their
sojournings in soul and body beyond those mysterious tombs which were
more houses than graves.  I recalled, in dream-shapes which it is
well that I do not remember, the peculiar and elaborate construction
of Egyptian sepulchers; and the exceedingly singular and terrific
doctrines which determined this construction.

All these people thought of was death and the dead.  They conceived
of a literal resurrection of the body which made them mummify it with
desperate care, and preserve all the vital organs in canopic jars
near the corpse; whilst besides the body they believed in two other
elements, the soul, which after its weighing and approval by Osiris
dwelt in the land of the blest, and the obscure and portentous _ka_
or life-principle which wandered about the upper and lower worlds in
a horrible way, demanding occasional access to the preserved body,
consuming the food offerings brought by priests and pious relatives
to the mortuary chapel, and sometimes--as men whispered--taking its
body, or the wooden double always buried beside it, and stalking
noxiously abroad on errands peculiarly repellent.

For thousands of years those bodies rested gorgeously encased and
staring glassily upward when not visited by the _ka_, awaiting the
day when Osiris should restore both _ka_ and soul, and lead forth the
stiff legions of the dead from the sunken houses of sleep.  It was to
have been a glorious rebirth--but not all souls were approved, nor
were all tombs inviolate, so that certain grotesque _mistakes_ and
fiendish _abnormalities_ were to be looked for.  Even today the Arabs
murmur of unsanctified convocations and unwholesome worship in
forgotten nether abysses, which only winged invisible _kas_ and
soulless mummies may visit and return unscathed.

Perhaps the most leeringly blood-congealing legends are those which
relate to certain perverse products of decadent
priestcraft--composite mummies made by the artificial union of human
trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in imitation of the elder
gods.  At all stages of history the sacred animals were mummified, so
that consecrated bulls, cats, ibises, crocodiles, and the like might
return some day to greater glory.  But only in the decadence did they
mix the human and animal in the same mummy--only in the decadence,
when they did not understand the rights and prerogatives of the _ka_
and the soul.

What happened to those composite mummies is not told of--at least
publicly--and it is certain that no Egyptologist ever found one.  The
whispers of Arabs are very wild, and cannot be relied upon.  They
even hint that old Khephren--he of the Sphinx, the Second Pyramid,
and the yawning gateway temple--lives far underground wedded to the
ghoul-queen Nitocris and ruling over the mummies that are neither of
man nor of beast.

It was of these--of Khephren and his consort and his strange armies
of the hybrid dead--that I dreamed, and that is why I am glad the
exact dream-shapes have faded from my memory.  My most horrible
vision was connected with an idle question I had asked myself the day
before when looking at the great carven riddle of the desert and
wondering with what unknown depth the temple close to it might be
secretly connected.  That question, so innocent and whimsical then,
assumed in my dream a meaning of frenetic and hysterical madness ...
_what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven
to represent?_

My second awakening--if awakening it was--is a memory of stark
hideousness which nothing else in my life, save one thing which came
after, can parallel; and that life has been full and adventurous
beyond most men's.  Remember that I had lost consciousness whilst
buried beneath a cascade of falling rope whose immensity revealed the
cataclysmic depth of my present position.  Now, as perception
returned, I felt the entire weight gone; and realized upon rolling
over that although I was still tied, gagged, and blindfolded, _some
agency had removed completely the suffocating hempen landslide which
had overwhelmed me_.  The significance of this condition, of course,
came to me only gradually; but even so I think it would have brought
unconsciousness again had I not by this time reached such a state of
emotional exhaustion that no new horror could make much difference.
I was alone ... with what?

Before I could torture myself with any new reflection, or make any
fresh effort to escape from my bonds, an additional circumstance
became manifest.  Pains not formerly felt were racking my arms and
legs, and I seemed coated with a profusion of dried blood beyond
anything my former cuts and abrasions could furnish.  My chest, too,
seemed pierced by a hundred wounds, as though some malign, titanic
ibis had been pecking at it.  Assuredly the agency which had removed
the rope was a hostile one, and had begun to wreak terrible injuries
upon me when somehow impelled to desist.  Yet at the time my
sensations were distinctly the reverse of what one might expect.
Instead of sinking into a bottomless pit of despair, I was stirred to
a new courage and action; for now I felt that the evil forces were
physical things which a fearless man might encounter on an even basis.

On the strength of this thought I tugged again at my bonds, and used
all the art of a life-time to free myself as I had so often done
amidst the glare of lights and the applause of vast crowds.  The
familiar details of my escaping process commenced to engross me, and
now that the long rope was gone I half regained my belief that the
supreme horrors were hallucinations after all, and that there had
never been any terrible shaft, measureless abyss of interminable
rope.  Was I after all in the gateway temple of Khephren beside the
Sphinx, and had the sneaking Arabs stolen in to torture me as I lay
helpless there?  At any rate, I must be free.  Let me stand up
unbound, ungagged, and with my eyes open to catch any glimmer of
light which might come trickling from any source, and I could
actually delight in the combat against evil and treacherous foes!

How long I took in shaking off my encumbrances I cannot tell.  It
must have been longer than in my exhibition performances, because I
was wounded, exhausted, and enervated by the experiences I had passed
through.  When I was finally free, and taking deep breaths of a
chill, damp, evilly spiced air all the more horrible when encountered
without the screen of gag and blindfolded edges, I found that I was
too cramped and fatigued to move at once.  There I lay, trying to
stretch a frame bent and mangled, for an indefinite period, and
straining my eyes to catch a glimpse of some ray of light which would
give a hint as to my position.

By degrees my strength and flexibility returned, but my eyes beheld
nothing.  As I staggered to my feet I peered diligently in every
direction, yet met only an ebony blackness as great as that I had
known when blindfolded.  I tried my legs, blood-encrusted beneath my
shredded trousers, and found that I could walk; yet could not decide
in what direction to go.  Obviously I ought not to walk at random,
and perhaps retreat directly from the entrance I sought; so I paused
to note the direction of the cold, fetid, natron-scented air-current
which I had never ceased to feel.  Accepting the point of its source
as the possible entrance to the abyss, I strove to keep track of this
landmark and to walk consistently toward it.

I had a match-box with me, and even a small electric flashlight; but
of course the pockets of my tossed and tattered clothing were long
since emptied of all heavy articles.  As I walked cautiously in the
blackness, the draft grew stronger and more offensive, till at length
I could regard it as nothing less than a tangible steam of detestable
vapor pouring out of some aperture like the smoke of the genie from
the fisherman's jar in the Eastern tale.  The East ... Egypt ...
truly, this dark cradle of civilization was ever the wellspring of
horrors and marvels unspeakable!

The more I reflected on the nature of this cavern wind, the greater
my sense of disquiet became; for although despite its odor I had
sought its source as at least an indirect clue to the outer world, I
now saw plainly that this foul emanation could have no admixture or
connection whatsoever with the clean air of the Libyan Desert, but
must be essentially a thing vomited from sinister gulfs still lower
down.  I had, then, been walking in the wrong direction!

After a moment's reflection I decided not to retrace my steps.  Away
from the draft I would have no landmarks, for the roughly level rock
floor was devoid of distinctive configurations.  If, however, I
followed up the strange current, I would undoubtedly arrive at an
aperture of some sort, from whose gate I could perhaps work round the
walls to the opposite side of this Cyclopean and otherwise
unnavigable hall.  That I might fail, I well realized.  I saw that
this was no part of Khephren's gateway temple which tourists know,
and it struck me that this particular hall might be unknown even to
archaeologists, and merely stumbled upon by the inquisitive and
malignant Arabs who had imprisoned me.  If so, was there any present
gate of escape to the known parts or to the outer air?

What evidence, indeed, did I now possess that this was the gateway
temple at all?  For a moment all my wildest speculations rushed back
upon me, and I thought of that vivid melange of impressions--the
descent, suspension in space, the rope, my wounds, and the dreams
that were frankly dreams.  Was this the end of life for me?  Or
indeed, would it be merciful if this moment were the end?  I could
answer none of my own questions, but merely kept on, till Fate for a
third time reduced me to oblivion.

This time there were no dreams, for the suddenness of the incident
shocked me out of all thought either conscious or subconscious.
Tripping on an unexpected descending step at a point where the
offensive draft became strong enough to offer an actual physical
resistance, I was precipitated headlong down a black flight of huge
stone stairs into a gulf of hideousness unrelieved.

That I ever breathed again is a tribute to the inherent vitality of
the healthy human organism.  Often I look back to that night and feel
a touch of actual humor in those repeated lapses of consciousness;
lapses whose succession reminded me at the time of nothing more than
the crude cinema melodramas of that period.  Of course, it is
possible that the repeated lapses never occurred; and that all the
features of that underground nightmare were merely the dreams of one
long coma which began with the shock of my descent into that abyss
and ended with the healing balm of the outer air and of the rising
sun which found me stretched on the sands of Gizeh before the
sardonic and dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.

I prefer to believe this latter explanation as much as I can, hence
was glad when the police told me that the barrier to Khephren's
gateway temple had been found unfastened, and that a sizeable rift to
the surface did actually exist in one corner of the still buried
part.  I was glad, too, when the doctors pronounced my wounds only
those to be expected from my seizure, blindfolding, lowering,
struggling with bonds, falling some distance--perhaps into a
depression in the temple's inner gallery--dragging myself to the
outer barrier and escaping from it, and experiences like that ... a
very soothing diagnosis.  And yet I know that there must be more than
appears on the surface.  That extreme descent is too vivid a memory
to be dismissed--and it is odd that no one has ever been able to find
a man answering the description of my guide.  Abdul Reis el
Drogman--the tomb-throated guide who looked and smiled like King
Khephren.

I have digressed from my connected narrative--perhaps in the vain
hope of evading the telling of that final incident; that incident
which of all is most certainly an hallucination.  But I promised to
relate it, and I do not break promises.  When I recovered--or seemed
to recover--my senses after that fall down the black stone stairs, I
was quite as alone and in darkness as before.  The windy stench, bad
enough before, was now fiendish; yet I had acquired enough
familiarity by this time to bear it stoically.  Dazedly I began to
crawl away from the place whence the putrid wind came, and with my
bleeding hands felt the colossal blocks of a mighty pavement.  Once
my head struck against a hard object, and when I felt of it I learned
that it was the base of a column--a column of unbelievable
immensity--whose surface was covered with gigantic chiseled
hieroglyphics very perceptible to my touch.

Crawling on, I encountered other titan columns at incomprehensible
distances apart; when suddenly my attention was captured by the
realization of something which must have been impinging on my
subconscious hearing long before the conscious sense was aware of it.

From some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were proceeding certain
_sounds_, measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard
before.  That they were very ancient and distinctly ceremonial, I
felt almost intuitively; and much reading in Egyptology led me to
associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the
tympanum.  In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling, and beating I
felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth--a
terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form
of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold
within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic
cacophonies.  The sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they
were approaching.  Then--and may all the gods of all pantheons unite
to keep the like from my ears again--I began to hear, faintly and
afar off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching things.

It was hideous that footfalls so dissimilar should move in such
perfect rhythm.  The training of unhallowed thousands of years must
lie behind that march of earth's inmost monstrosities ... padding,
clicking, walking, stalking, rumbling, lumbering, crawling ... and
all to the abhorrent discords of those mocking instruments.  And
then--God keep the memory of those Arab legends out of my head!--the
mummies without souls ... the meeting-place of the wandering _kas_
... the hordes of the devil-cursed pharaonic dead of forty centuries
... the _composite mummies_ led through the uttermost onyx voids by
King Khephren and his ghoul-queen Nitocris....

The tramping drew nearer--Heaven save me from the sound of those feet
and paws and hooves and pads and talons as it commenced to acquire
detail!  Down limitless reaches of sunless pavement a spark of light
flickered in the malodorous wind and I drew behind the enormous
circumference of a Cyclopic column that I might escape for a while
the horror that was stalking million-footed toward me through
gigantic hypostyles of inhuman dread and phobic antiquity.  The
flickers increased, and the tramping and dissonant rhythm grew
sickeningly loud.  In the quivering orange light there stood faintly
forth a scene of such stony awe that I gasped from sheer wonder that
conquered even fear and repulsion.  Bases of columns whose middles
were higher than human sight ... mere bases of things that must each
dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance ... hieroglyphics carved by
unthinkable hands in caverns where daylight can be only a remote
legend....

I _would not_ look at the marching things.  That I desperately
resolved as I heard their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above
the dead music and the dead tramping.  It was merciful that they did
not speak ... but God! _their crazy torches began to cast shadows on
the surface of those stupendous columns.  Hippopotami should not have
human hands and carry torches ... men should not have the heads of
crocodiles...._

I tried to turn away, but the shadows and the sounds and the stench
were everywhere.  Then I remembered something I used to do in
half-conscious nightmares as a boy, and began to repeat to myself,
"This is a dream!  This is a dream!"  But it was of no use, and I
could only shut my eyes and pray ... at least, that is what I think I
did, for one is never sure in visions--and I know this can have been
nothing more.  I wondered whether I should ever reach the world
again, and at times would furtively open my eyes to see if I could
discern any feature of the place other than the wind of spiced
putrefaction, the topless columns, and the thaumatrophically
grotesque shadows of abnormal horror.  The sputtering glare of
multiplying torches now shone, and unless this hellish place were
wholly without walls, I could not fail to see some boundary or fixed
landmark soon.  But I had to shut my eyes again when I realized how
many of the things were assembling--and when I glimpsed a certain
object walking solemnly and steadily _without any body above the
waist_.

A fiendish and ululant corpse-gurgle or death-rattle now split the
very atmosphere--the charnel atmosphere poisonous with naftha and
bitumen blasts--and in one concerted chorus from the ghoulish legion
of hybrid blasphemies.  My eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an
instant upon a sight which no human creature could even imagine
without panic, fear, and physical exhaustion.  The things had filed
ceremonially in one direction, the direction of the noisome wind,
where the light of their torches showed their bended heads--or the
bended heads of such as had heads.  They were worshipping before a
great black fetor-belching aperture which reached up almost out of
sight, and which I could see was flanked at right angles by two giant
staircases whose ends were far away in shadow.  One of these was
indubitably the staircase I had fallen down.

The dimensions of the hole were fully in proportion with those of the
columns--an ordinary house would have been lost in it, and any
average public building could easily have been moved in and out.  It
was so vast a surface that only by moving the eye could one trace its
boundaries ... so vast, so hideously black, and so aromatically
stinking....  Directly in front of this yawning Polyphemus-door the
things were throwing objects--evidently sacrifices or religious
offerings, to judge by their gestures.  Khephren was their leader;
sneering King Khephren _or the guide Abdul Reis_, crowned with a
golden pshent and intoning endless formulae with the hollow voice of
the dead.  By his side knelt beautiful Queen Nitocris whom I saw in
profile for a moment, noting that the right half of her face was
eaten away by rats or other ghouls.  And I shut my eyes again when I
saw what objects were being thrown as offerings to the fetid aperture
or its possible local deity.

It occurred to me that, judging from the elaborateness of this
worship, the concealed deity must be one of considerable importance.
Was it Osiris or Isis, Horus or Anubis, or some vast unknown God of
the Dead still more central and supreme?  There is a legend that
terrible altars and colossi were reared to an Unknown One before ever
the known gods were worshipped....

And now, as I steeled myself to watch the rapt and sepulchral
adorations of those nameless things, a thought of escape flashed upon
me.  The hall was dim, and the columns heavy with shadow.  With every
creature of that nightmare throng absorbed in shocking raptures, it
might be barely possible for me to creep past to the far-away end of
one of the staircases and ascend unseen; trusting to Fate and skill
to deliver me from the upper reaches.  Where I was, I neither knew
nor seriously reflected upon--and for a moment it struck me as
amusing to plan a serious escape from that which I knew to be a
dream.  Was I in some hidden and unsuspected lower realm of
Khephren's gateway temple--that temple which generations have
persistently called the Temple of the Sphinx?  I could not
conjecture, but I resolved to ascend to life and consciousness if wit
and muscle could carry me.

Wriggling flat on my stomach, I began the anxious journey toward the
foot of the left-hand staircase, which seemed the more accessible of
the two.  I cannot describe the incidents and sensations of that
crawl, but they may be guessed when one reflects on what I had to
watch steadily in that malign, wind-blown torchlight in order to
avoid detection.  The bottom of the staircase was, as I have said,
far away in shadow, as it had to be to rise without a bend to the
dizzy parapeted landing above the titanic aperture.  This placed the
last stages of my crawl at some distance from the noisome herd,
though the spectacle chilled me even when quite remote at my right.

At length I succeeded in reaching the steps and began to climb;
keeping close to the wall, on which I observed decorations of the
most hideous sort, and relying for safety on the absorbed, ecstatic
interest with which the monstrosities watched the foul-breezed
aperture and the impious objects of nourishment they had flung on the
pavement before it.  Though the staircase was huge and steep,
fashioned of vast porphyry blocks as if for the feet of a giant, the
ascent seemed virtually interminable.  Dread of discovery and the
pain which renewed exercise had brought to my wounds combined to make
that upward crawl a thing of agonizing memory.  I had intended, on
reaching the landing, to climb immediately onward along whatever
upper staircase might mount from there; stopping for no last look at
the carrion abominations that pawed and genuflected some seventy or
eighty feet below--yet a sudden repetition of that thunderous
corpse-gurgle and death-rattle chorus, coming as I had nearly gained
the top of the flight and showing by its ceremonial rhythm that it
was not an alarm of my discovery, caused me to pause and peer
cautiously over the parapet.

The monstrosities were hailing something which had poked itself out
of the nauseous aperture to seize the hellish fare proffered it.  It
was something quite ponderous, even as seen from my height; something
yellowish and hairy, and endowed with a sort of nervous motion.  It
was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very
curiously shaped.  It seemed to have no neck, but five separate
shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk; the
first very small, the second good-sized, the third and fourth equal
and largest of all, and the fifth rather small, though not so small
as the first.

Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized
ravenously on the excessively great quantities of unmentionable food
placed before the aperture.  Once in a while the thing would leap up,
and occasionally it would retreat into its den in a very odd manner.
Its locomotion was so inexplicable that I stared in fascination,
wishing it would emerge farther from the cavernous lair beneath me.

Then it _did emerge_ ... it _did_ emerge, and at the sight I turned
and fled into the darkness up the higher staircase that rose behind
me; fled unknowingly up incredible steps and ladders and inclined
planes to which no human sight or logic guided me, and which I must
ever relegate to the world of dreams for want of any confirmation.
It must have been a dream, or the dawn would never have found me
breathing on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic dawn-flushed face
of the Great Sphinx.

The Great Sphinx!  God!--that idle question I asked myself on that
sun-blest morning before ... _what huge and loathsome abnormality was
the Sphinx originally carven to represent_?  Accursed is the sight,
be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror--the
unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the
unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that
should not exist.  The five-headed monster that emerged ... that
five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus ... the five-headed
monster--_and that of which it is the merest forepaw_ ...

But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.






* * * * * * * * * *


Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation is as printed.

This story was drawn from the H. P. Lovecraft anthology "The Shadow
over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror."

Most of the stories are in either Faded Page
(https://www.fadedpage.com/) or Project Gutenberg
(https://www.gutenberg.org/):

  The Colour out of Space (1927) (Project Gutenberg)
  The Outsider (1926) (Faded Page)
  Imprisoned with the Pharaohs (1924, 1965) (Faded Page)
  The Transition of Juan Romero (1919, 1944) (Faded Page)
  In the Walls of Eryx (1936)
  The Festival (1925) (Project Gutenberg)
  The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936) (Project Gutenberg)


"In the Walls of Eryx" is not in Faded Page because it was co-written
by Kenneth Sterling (1920-1995), so is still in copyright in Canada.
It will not be out of Canadian copyright until 2066.  It will not be
out of American copyright, and eligible for Project Gutenberg, until
2032.

Note: the above links are not live--you must select/copy/paste them
into your browser.


[The end of _Imprisoned with the Pharaohs_ by H. P. Lovecraft]