He had said that the _geometry_ of the dream-place he saw was abnormal,
non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart
from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing
at the terrible reality. Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous
Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which
could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed
distorted when viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from
this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked
leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second
glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity. Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before
anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each
would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was
only half-heartedly that they searched--vainly, as it proved--for some
portable souvenir to bear away. It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith
and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked
curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon
bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all
felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and
jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like
a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would
have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be
sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative
position of everything else seemed fantasmally variable. Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then
Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point
separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque
stone molding--that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not
after all horizontal--and the men wondered how any door in the universe
could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel
began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and
rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the
monstrously carven portal. In this fantasy of prismatic distortion it
moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter
and perspective seemed upset. The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That
tenebrousness was indeed a _positive quality_; for it obscured such
parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually
burst forth like smoke from its eon-long imprisonment, visibly
darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky
on flapping membranous wings. The odor arising from the newly opened
depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought
he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and
everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight
and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black
doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness. Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of
the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure
fright in that accursed instant. The Thing can not be described--there
is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy,
such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth
a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that
telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of
the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and
what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent
sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great
Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight. Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God
rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan,
Guerrera and Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging
frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat,
and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which
shouldn't have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as
if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and
pulled desperately for the _Alert_ as the mountainous monstrosity
flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of
the water. Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure
of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments
of feverish rushing up and down between wheels and engines to get
the _Alert_ under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that
indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on
the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing
from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing
ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu
slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising
strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing
shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one
night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously. But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could
surely overtake the _Alert_ until steam was fully up, he resolved
on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran
lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty
eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted
higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against
the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern
of a demon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came
nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on
relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness
as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and
a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant
the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then
there was only a venomous seething astern; where--God in heaven!--the
scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously
_recombining_ in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened
every second as the _Alert_ gained impetus from its mounting steam. *       *       *       *       *

That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the
cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the
laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first
bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul.