[44] whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, frightened him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness[45] and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient ages before the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk;[46] and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest,[47] expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. The most important thing was the fetish, around which they danced when the aurora leaped high[48] over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, was very exciting to Inspector Legrasse, and he at once began to ply his informant with questions. He noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers which his men had arrested. So he asked the professor to remember the syllables that he had heard from the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals. What both the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn[49].”
Legrasse said that some his mongrel prisoners had told him the meaning of these words. This text, as given, ran something like this:
“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming[50].”
And now Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers. This is the story to which my uncle attached profound significance. It was the wildest dream of a myth-maker or a theosophist.
On November 1st, 1907, frantic summons came to the New Orleans police from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The people there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men,[51] were in stark terror from an unknown thing which had occurred in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom[52] had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no one walked. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.[53]
So twenty police officers in two carriages and an automobile went there with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the road they walked for miles in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss[54] beset them. Finally, the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out. The beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came when the wind shifted. The squatters refused to go toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues went into black arcades of horror.
