Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there
was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during
which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned _with yellow hair
turned white_ after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at
Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed
with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience
he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty
officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address. After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and
members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the _Alert_, now sold and
in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing
from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish
head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was
preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well,
finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the
same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of
material which I had noted in Legrasse's smaller specimen. Geologists,
the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed
that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of
what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: "They
had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them." Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I
now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I
re-embarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day
landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold
Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries
that the greater city masqueraded as "Christiania." I made the brief
trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat
and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black
answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told
me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more. He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at
sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told
the public, but had left a long manuscript--of "technical matters" as
he said--written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from
the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near
the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window
had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his
feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians
found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a
weakened constitution. I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave
me till I, too, am at rest; "accidentally" or otherwise. Persuading the
widow that my connection with her husband's "technical matters" was
sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away
and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing--a naive sailor's effort at a
post-facto diary--and strove to recall day by day that last awful
voyage. I can not attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its
cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to show why
the sound of the water against the vessel's sides became so unendurable
to me that I stopped my ears with cotton. Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the
city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think
of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space,
and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream
beneath the sea, known and favored by a nightmare cult ready and eager
to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave
their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air. *       *       *       *       *

Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The _Emma_, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had
felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have
heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held
up by the _Alert_ on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as
he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends
on the _Alert_ he speaks with significant horror. There was some
peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction
seem almost a duty, and Johansen shows ingenuous wonder at the charge
of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the
court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured
yacht under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone pillar
sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126°
43' come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean
masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of
earth's supreme terror--the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that
was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome
shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu
and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last,
after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams
of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a
pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not
suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough! I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned
citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the
waters. When I think of the _extent_ of all that may be brooding down
there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were
awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder demons,
and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or
of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone
blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the
stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the
queer image found in the shrine on the _Alert_, is poignantly visible
in every line of the mate's frightened description. Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something
very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing
any definite structure or building, he dwells only on the broad
impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces--surfaces too great to
belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with
horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about _angles_
because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams.