(Found
Among the Papers of the Late Francis
Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of
such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a
survival of a hugely remote period when . . . consciousness was manifested,
perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing
humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying
memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds.
. . .”
—Algernon
Blackwood.
I.
The
Horror in Clay.
The
most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind
to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the
midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage
far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us
little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up
such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that
we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into
the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome
grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient
incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze
the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there
came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it
and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of
truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in
this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that
no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall
never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the
professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he
would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.
My knowledge of the thing began in the
winter of 1926–27 with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell,
Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode
Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient
inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent
museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many.
Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The
professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling
suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking
negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous
hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in
Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded
after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the
brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the
end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am
inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.
