The Breath from the Tomb

A bit of pastiche dedicated to Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Clouds darken the sky,
The stars rain down,
The constellations stagger,
The bones of the hell-hounds tremble,
The porters are silent,
When they see the king’s soul arise
As the dawn

— Pyramid Texts, 2300 BC

I. The quest for Sekharos

I leave this brief memoir in the hope that whoever finds it—if anyone remains to find it—will comprehend the desperate act I now intend to undertake. Perhaps they will sympathize with the immensity of the fear that compels me to it. Or, if I fail in my mission and the catastrophe unfolds, they will at least know how man arrived at such a terrible doom, and may perhaps take some propitious action that will save a remnant for the future.

In 1929, as everyone knows, the United States and the world plunged into a severe economic crisis. I was escaped the worst of it as a participant in an archaeological expedition in the ancient city of Thebes in southern Egypt. The details of this expedition and the nature of what we discovered have remained largely unknown to the public, and for good reason. Even now, I hesitate to reveal them, fearing that some might mistake me for a madman.

Professor Morris Deschanel of Davis University in upstate New York led the expedition. Unusually, he was not a professor of archeology but of ancient languages. He had recently completed a 10-year project involving the collation and retranslation of the remaining fragments of the ancient historian Manetho’s Aegyptica. Manetho, a historian and priest of the god Thoth at Sebennytus, wrote his Greek-language history of Egypt around 300 BC. However, the monumental work was lost by the time of the fall of Rome. Only fragments preserved in the works of Josephus Flavius and the church fathers survived. Even these fragments were of questionable accuracy and, at times, undoubtedly corrupt, especially in the frequently misleading transliterations of Egyptian names—often those of pharaohs.

It was this particular idiosyncrasy that prompted Professor Deschanel’s expedition. He convinced himself that a fragment preserved by Clement of Alexandria, which referenced a pharaoh named Sekharos, did not, as Egyptologists had long believed, refer to the pharaoh Sobekemsaf II. He was certain that the subject was a previously unknown ruler from the Second Intermediate Period who reigned sometime between 1600 and 1550 BC and likely fought against the Hyksos conquerors.

Regarding Sekharos, the passage said almost nothing. But the professor was intrigued by a vague term that could be interpreted as “the heretic.” He believed this might indicate a precursor of the monotheistic cult of the sun god Aten, which the famous pharaoh Akhenaten institutionalized two centuries later—only for his successors to erase it for millennia.

The prospect ignited the professor’s agile mind. He embarked on an obsessive search for the true name and identity of the enigmatic pharaoh, disregarding his colleague’s admonitions that he was engaged in a futile quest for Sobekemsaf II.

The professor, driven by the anxieties that beset most academics who have passed early middle age without leaving their mark, was of a stubborn disposition. He yearned for some great discovery to match his genius and convinced himself, by means fair or foul, that Sekharos was key to the fame he coveted. As I soon discovered, he relentlessly pursued his goal, regardless of the cost to himself and the world.

Given the probable dates of Sekharos’s reign and the behavior of his immediate predecessors and successors—if, of course, he had existed at all—the professor deduced that Sekharos must have ruled from Thebes, the southern capital where the native Egyptians began their war on the Hyksos and later regained control of their entire country. Extrapolating from this hypothesis, the professor concluded that Sekharos must be buried at the royal tomb complex located on the outskirts of the ancient city. A tomb serves as the most compelling evidence of a pharaoh’s existence, and thus, the professor set his sights on Thebes as the most probable site of his hoped-for discovery.

By that time, ancient tomb robbers and modern archeologists had long since “picked clean” the Theban tomb complex. Scholars unanimously concluded that nothing more remained to discover at the site. Nonetheless, the professor’s infectious passion for the subject convinced several obscure financiers afflicted with Egyptomania to sponsor his expedition. Thus, in 1927, he arrived in Thebes to commence initial surveys. Over the subsequent two years, the expedition made no significant discoveries, though I discovered that the professor had not been idle during that time.

My involvement in what became such a fateful enterprise happened by mere chance—or, as I imagine the pharaohs would have concluded, fate. During my youthful wanderings across the vast expanse of the British Empire, I embarked on a journey that took me from the bustling streets of New York City to the enchanting lands of India, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Ultimately, I found myself in Cairo in the spring of 1929, with dwindling assets and dissipated by the pleasures of Beirut. I realized that I would require assistance if I were to continue my travels. So, I visited the American embassy, where they told me that I had the option to return to the United States immediately or secure gainful if underpaid employment.

I opted for the latter and they informed me that a rather eccentric American scholar was in search of a secretary. A few moments later, I found myself shouting down a rickety phone line to Thebes as I attempted to answer Professor Deschanel’s inquiries about my qualifications or lack thereof. Apparently, my proficiency in shorthand convinced him that I was worth hiring, and he promised to wire me the money for the trip to Thebes by the next day.

I returned to the American hotel in good spirits and even treated myself to the kind of drinks unobtainable almost anywhere else in that devout country. The next morning, I arrived promptly at the Western Union office and found the wire waiting for me. It proved more generous than I had anticipated—almost an advance on a month’s salary—and I couldn’t help but wonder if the professor needed more assistance than I had been led to believe.

I immediately headed to the Cairo station, boarded a train south, and spent hours in a swaying car that reeked of boiled meat and burnt sand. I then underwent a bone-rattling ride in a tiny bus barely worthy of the name, traversing often unpaved and rocky roads until we finally reached the nearest town to the once-great Thebes. There, I managed to hire a somewhat functional car and a driver to take me to the expedition site.

Throughout the journey, I was struck by the conspicuous absence of the splendors of ancient Egypt. The broken foundations of ancient temples and palaces dotted the landscape. Here and there, a few crumbling walls adorned with those enigmatic and strange images and pictographs that captivated the modern world could be seen. But beyond that, desert and jagged rock dominated the landscape. My mind was much occupied by the final lines of Shelley’s immortal “Ozymandias”:

Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away

I had the dispiriting thought that this was the legacy of the pharaohs: Stones cracked and buried beneath two millennia of Christianity and Islam, which regarded all those ancient deities to whom the broken monuments had been erected as mere delusions unworthy even of scorn. The greatness of those ancient kings, like all things human, had been—in the grand scheme of things—terribly fleeting.

When I alighted from the car, two Bedouin workmen, who grasped enough of my basic Arabic to communicate, kindly guided me towards Professor Deschanel’s tent. I found the famed and in certain circles infamous academic bent over a rubbing of a lengthy hieroglyphic text. A pipe was burning down in his hand to his total indifference and his large round glasses were slowly descending down the length of his nose. It took him several minutes to notice my presence, and when he finally lifted his gaze, his expression remained completely blank. He turned back to the rubbing for some time, then sat back and rubbed his carefully trimmed gray beard.

We exchanged a few pleasantries. I recounted my journey to Egypt and offered my mostly fictional qualifications for the secretarial position. Seemingly indifferent to them, he began to describe my duties, which primarily involved typing his notes, letters, and memoranda. He also mentioned organizing and properly filing his papers, which, judging by the clutter that littered every available horizontal surface of his tent, would be a near-herculean task. Even the carpeted floor was strewn with piles of aging books, so one had to pick one’s way gingerly across the floor for fear of damaging some thousand-year-old priceless and irreplaceable manuscript. The professor then offered me a weekly salary that I found to be as generous as the advance. My accommodations, he informed me, were already available.

He seemed to assume my agreement to his terms and proceeded to describe the current state of the expedition. He explained his theory of the lost pharaoh Sekharos, most of which was incomprehensible to me due to my lack of expertise in the subject. He inquired if I was aware of his and the expedition’s reputation in scholarly circles and appeared pleased that I wasn’t.

He informed me that, despite the rumors circulating in the academic community, the expedition had been busy. They had unearthed several stelae and other inscriptions from the relevant era in an exceptional state of preservation, including the one he was currently examining. This evidence had corroborated his initial suspicions and he was firmly convinced that Sekharos was indeed real.

The professor had concluded that the pharaoh’s uncorrupted name was Sutekhmet. He found it unlikely that the pharaoh was of Asiatic origin, although this was a possibility. It was more likely that the Sutekhmet was a native Egyptian who followed his predecessors’ policy of reconquest. Although he hadn’t completed the expulsion of the Hyksos, he likely fought several significant battles to secure Thebes and its surrounding area for Egyptian rule.

As I have said, all of this was quite foreign to me at the time—though, God help me, it is not now. Nonetheless, I nodded along as if I understood every word. Hoping to appear discerning and intelligent, I asked the professor about his plans to announce his findings to the world.

“Impossible as of yet,” he replied. “My evidence is purely textual and, I admit, highly speculative, though I am personally convinced of its accuracy. Were I to publish now, my academic enemies would tear me to pieces. No, what I require is physical proof: a mummy. I require the corpse of Sutekhmet himself. That is the only proof that will satisfy the world.”

“His tomb, then, is the current object of your inquiries?”

“Yes. This brings me to the most daunting aspect of your duties. I believe that the tomb of Sutekhmet will not be found in Thebes itself. I have satisfied myself that, on this point, my detractors are correct: The Theban necropolis is exhausted. All the tombs have been found. The tomb of Sutekhmet must be found elsewhere.”

“You can’t intend to scour all Egypt to find this man.”

“Of course not, but it will not be necessary.” He pointed to a line of characters on the rubbing before him. “You see here?”

I tried to look interested, but the professor immediately realized that I couldn’t read a single letter of Egyptian.

“It means,” he explained, “‘The king’s soul sets over Pewet-ka.’ Pewet-ka is the ancient name of a small oasis some 10 miles west of here. The locals refer to it as ‘Bir al-Ashbah’: The Well of Ghosts. That is, I would note, a precise and literal translation of the Egyptian ‘Pewet-ka.’ On that oasis stands the ruins of a small temple that, during the Second Intermediate Period, was dedicated to Osiris—the god of the dead. It was revered for centuries up to the 4th century AD, when it was destroyed by a Christian mob. No expedition has ever bothered with it and there is no sign of a tomb at the site. Nonetheless, if the name Well of Ghosts has survived this long, I think it is not unreasonable to assume that a man prominent enough for some trace of his memory to survive the centuries may well be buried there. This is particularly the case for a royal burial, which would have served as the basis of a priestly cult that would preside over the worship of the soul of the deceased ruler. Yes, I believe Sutekhmet is there, buried in a tomb once presided over by the priests of Osiris for a thousand years.”

“If that can be proven, it would be an extraordinary find.”

“Certainly, most extraordinary. And who knows what or who else besides Sutekhmet may be found there? Hence my urgent request to the embassy. Two nights from now, I and a minimal team of workers will make the ancient pilgrimage to Pewet-ka by camel and I require a capable secretary to ensure that every detail is precisely recorded.”

“And if we find nothing?”

“Then your task is all the easier,” he said. “But I assure you, we will not find nothing.”

II. The cursed oasis

The Egyptians believed that the sun died at dusk and was reborn with the dawn. It was fitting, then, we embarked on our journey at dusk. As the sun the ancients worshipped descended beneath the horizon, it cast a blood-red glow over the stones around us. I should have heeded then what I could not have known was an omen.

The arduous camel journey demanded a small party. However, I believe the professor also considered the possibility of failure and desired minimal witnesses. If his quest was to prove folly, he wanted to face the humiliation alone. Moreover, camels are valuable animals and expensive to hire, so a small group would minimize the financial burden. Thus, only the professor, myself, and six Bedouin guides and laborers would be present.

Spring in Egypt lasts at most a few weeks, so by the time of our expedition, the abrupt transition to the relentless and unforgiving heat of the Egyptian summer had already commenced. In the deep desert, few can withstand the heat of the day. Thus, like so many others over the endless millennia, we traveled by night.

Riding a camel with its sloped back and loping gait is not a comfortable experience. I spent the first two nights in a state of considerable discomfort, though my compatriots were unbothered. Quite quickly, however, this discomfort gave way to an unsettling disquiet and a growing fascination.

The desert at night is an awesome and eerie place. The air is dry and thin, devoid of any man-made illumination, allowing the celestial lights to shine undisturbed. As we rode, the vast enormity of the cosmos unfolded above us. I felt its deep time and infinite stars—light long dead, stretching back into eternity itself—as an almost physical sensation. The desert sky, unlike the black skies I had seen in cities, was a blinking glow of billions of stars, cloven in two by the foggy mass of the Milky Way and dominated by the magnificent pale white of the full moon.

I began to comprehend the reasons behind the ancient Arabs’ reverence for the moon and their continued practice of measuring time solely by its cycles. It served as our guide, our lighthouse, and our sentinel guardian. Its reflected fire revealed the rocks and crags of the desert, illuminating the way to our strange destination.

I thought of the mad Cambyses, the ancient Persian invader of Egypt, whose mighty army was swallowed by the sands. I wondered if that magnificent host had, in fact, been consumed by the moon. No man, after all, had survived to tell the tale of what really happened. I wondered too how many other generals and kings, how many beleaguered merchant caravans, how many pharaohs had traversed this alien place; this other planet that existed upon the earth but was not of it.

By day, the blazing sun, an inferno in space, cast an unrelenting solar white over the world, obliterating the blue of the sky and leaving only the ferocious heat. We hid from the fire in our makeshift tents, all but naked under the thin cotton of the clothes the Bedouin had given us. Broiling sweat poured from our bodies as we drank constantly to stave off heatstroke. Fortunately, the professor was a man of long experience of the desert, so he had laid on an adequate supply of water.

During those long and fitful days in the desert furnace, I could not understand how the Egyptians had conceived of the sun as a god rather than a demon. I knew then why they had huddled so close to their great river and why Herodotus had called all Egypt the gift of the Nile.

On the fourth night, we were liberated from the desert. As the moon descended, the shadows against the stars abruptly transformed from the jagged crags of desert rock into the graceful slopes and curves of palm trees. We rushed into the oasis and, as the workmen gave thanks to God, we drank from a pool of reedy water and then threw ourselves into it, washing away the pitted dust of four nights’ travel.

As the first rays of dawn broke over the distant horizon, the workmen knelt in prayer, and we finally witnessed the vibrant greenery, the dark soil, and the birds nesting among the palm trees and reeds. Here, at last, was life again. For a moment, I felt that I too might kneel in prayer.

We rested all that day and slept through the night. But the professor was anxious not to exhaust our provisions. When the next dawn broke, he insisted that the work begin immediately.

He led us to the remains of the temple of Osiris, which was in a state of more or less absolute ruin—the only dead thing in that enclave of fertility. Even in its heyday, it had been a relatively modest structure, which was unsurprising given its location. But now, all that remained was its foundation and two crumbling retaining walls. I thought, once again, of “Ozymandias” and Shelley’s words:

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies

The professor had long been convinced that the tomb of Sutekhmet would be found beneath the temple. So, he immediately set the workers to digging and dictated his notes to me as fast as I could scribble them down in my desperate shorthand.

The sun beat down with terrible ferocity and I marveled at the workers’ endurance. However, we quickly grew frustrated as their prodigious efforts yielded little. The professor’s dictations faded away as he grew melancholy and quietly seethed at the earth’s refusal to give up its secrets. A few pieces of pottery and a handful of other implements were unearthed, none of them even slightly unusual. For three days, there was nothing more. The professor grew concerned that we would exhaust our supplies with nothing to show for it. The prospect of failure was staring him in the face. The workers themselves began to mutter that Allah had cursed the place and we were all soon to be burnt away by the sun.

But on the fourth day, a shout went up from the pit. The professor descended into the pit and emerged holding a small, dusty object in his hand. He displayed it to me with a triumphant expression on his face, but upon closer inspection, I found myself utterly perplexed as to why.

It was a small figurine, shaped like a man wrapped in mummy’s bandages and devoid of any distinguishing features. I expressed my confusion, and the professor, with some impatience, explained that it was an ushabti: A funerary item depicting a spirit tasked with guiding the deceased’s soul into the afterlife. There could be no better indication, he said, that a tomb was very close by.

He urged the workmen to intensify their efforts and promised them double pay. Their enthusiasm naturally increased and two more ushabtis were soon uncovered. But as the workmen toiled on and the sun descended towards the western horizon, the professor fell silent. He sat for a while at the edge of the deepening pit, holding the figurines in his hands. His expression grew increasingly troubled. Finally, he called me over and, with great care, placed the figurines in my hands.

“Do you see?” he asked.

“Of course,” I replied.

“No, do you see?”

I studied the figurines. It took me some time, but I did see it: There was something wrong with those tiny figures. It wasn’t immediately apparent because any unusual features appeared to be the result of the hyper-stylization characteristic of Egyptian art. By now, however, I knew enough of that tradition to discern that something else was at work. The shapes were incorrect. The figures were wrapped in the mummy’s shroud, but enough indications remained. Beneath those wrappings was something other than a human body. Or, perhaps, a human body so distorted as to suggest some horrifying and unsettling deformation.

“Congenital deformity?” I asked.

“Not impossible,” he replied. “Incestuous marriage was an established tradition within the royal family, which resulted in numerous abnormalities. But I have never seen it depicted outside the royal line. An ushabti is a servant and thus, by definition, non-royal. To see it depicted in such a figurine would be unprecedented.”

“Artistic license, perhaps?”

“To what purpose? Ushabtis are spiritual beings. Why depict them as imperfect, especially in such a grotesque manner?”

“Perhaps the pharaoh himself was deformed and his servants designed to resemble him.”

“Resemble the pharaoh? Unthinkable. The pharaoh was a living god. To depict his servants as resembling him would imply they were equal to him. That would have been a horrendous blasphemy.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know. The cult of Osiris here was isolated by pure geography. Perhaps, over time, they developed unusual, even heretical practices. But that prompts the question: Why would a pharaoh allow himself to be buried and then worshipped by heretics? Unless he was a heretic himself. There is the textual indication…”

I waited patiently for him to continue, but the professor said nothing more. After a moment’s silence, he took the figurines from my hand and returned to the edge of the pit.

The workers dug well into the night. As darkness fell, we lit torches around the site, and in the windless air, the steady amber glow cast elongated and peculiar shadows across the stones and soil. We became silhouettes against the fires and the silent, emotionless moon above us. As the hours passed, my eyelids grew heavy, and sleep gradually overtook me.

I dreamed then: I was suspended in an inky, boundless darkness devoid of any celestial bodies—no moon, no stars. It was a vast expanse of lightless cosmos that encompassed all that has ever existed or ever will exist. Then a silver-white glow emerged from the void. It grew larger and brighter until it took shape and became the great and gibbous moon. Upon it were the gray seas that are not seas, in which peoples see a face, others a rabbit, and others… Behind the great orb, faint echoes of its pale light took shape until they formed the entire expanse of the Milky Way and its boundless fires. For a moment, I thought that I had witnessed the birth of all things.

Then, as if carried on the cosmic waves, I heard the discordant wailing of a distant flute. Its melody resembled no scales or tones. As it gained in strength and volume, I trembled as the stars began to swirl with increasing speed, until they seemed to be dancing as if in a Dionysian frenzy. They began to form new constellations of an obscene and horrifying nature. I wanted to look away in disgust, but found I could not do so. I was disembodied and incorporeal, without limbs or senses. And as I watched, the moon opened its great slathering maw to devour me.

At that moment, a piercing shout from the pit jolted me out of my nightmare. I opened my eyes, still trembling from my vision, and witnessed the professor leap to his feet. With awkward, propulsive energy, he descended into the pit. For a moment, in the haze of half-consciousness, I mistook him for a man half his age. I rose to my feet and stumbled after him as the fog gradually cleared from my mind.

At the bottom of the pit, the professor and the workmen crowded around a large hole, through which the professor shone the beam of a flashlight. I peered over his shoulder and saw stone stairs hewn into the bare rock itself. I knew, in an instant, that no eye had fallen upon those stairs for many centuries.

The professor’s flashlight could not penetrate the gloom beyond. Frustrated, he handed me the flashlight and seized a pickaxe from one of the workmen. As we watched in astonishment, he smashed the axe into the fissure until he had widened it by several feet. He threw down the axe, snatched the flashlight from me, and started down those millennia-old stairs. In an instant, the flashlight’s glow vanished into the darkness.

The workers seized torches and we hurried after him, certain that he was in a frenzy that would bring him to harm. The stairs went down a short way, and then we found ourselves rushing down a corridor that seemed to have no end.

We quickly caught up with the professor, who was now standing stock still, silhouetted in the glow of his flashlight, staring in trancelike fascination at the corridor wall. I held a torch over his shoulder but saw only endless rows of those strange and uncanny hieroglyphs that I could not read.

“What does it mean?” I asked him.

“I have no idea,” he replied.

“None?”

“None whatsoever. The characters are recognizably from the Second Intermediate period, but the symbols are meaningless. This is no known dialect of Egyptian. I wonder if it’s a language at all…”

“But there must be thousands of them, depending on the length of the passage.”

“Yes, it’s a considerable amount of labor to expend on something unintelligible or outright nonsensical. Come on…”

He led us down the passage, which sloped slightly downward, drawing us ever further into the depths of the earth. As we went, our torches revealed dozens and then hundreds of the symbols he had told me meant nothing.

At last, a glint of gold appeared in the distance. As we approached, we saw the end of our journey emerging from the darkness. Two stone doors, affixed with unbroken golden seals, marked our destination.

“Intact!” the professor gasped.

We all knew what it meant: A tomb undisturbed by the ancient thieves who had plagued the pharaohs’ monuments for endless centuries. We knew as well that an unplundered tomb might contain a treasure unknown to man, possibly greater than that of Tutankhamen, whose intact tomb had caused such a sensation only a few short years before.

The professor spoke a few words in Arabic to the workmen. One of them withdrew a long knife from beneath his cloak and handed it to the professor, who held it out to me. I shook my head.

“I can’t,” the professor said. “My hands are shaking.”

I saw that a tremor was indeed running down the length of his arm to the fingers that grasped the knife, which shook of its own accord in the dim torchlight.

I took the knife from him, handed my torch to one of the workmen, and approached the doors with their golden seals. I saw that they bound to the great stone handles with rope. Rope, I realized, that no blade or hand had touched for some 3,000 years. I laid the blade of the knife upon it and thought that I, little more than a boy, had no right to disturb the rest of something so impossibly old. It seemed an act of the most deplorable blasphemy.

I turned back and saw my companions. The workmen bore expressions of trepidation and near-anguish on their faces. The professor’s eyes were filled with something very much like desperation. He was close to it now: The supreme moment of which he had dreamed for so long. I knew then that, however terrible the blasphemy might be, I had no choice but to cut that ancient rope. If I did not, I would condemn a man’s dream to oblivion.

All unknowing, I hacked the blade into the coarse fibers. Desiccated by 3,000 years in the desert air, the rope parted as if made of straw and fell away. The golden seals, shaped in the form of the winged eye of Horus, clattered to the ground, and the echoes receded down the dark passage with its walls of insane writing. The doors, whose makers thought closed for eternity, swung slowly open. I felt a gust of warm air, a dry breath from the tomb. Then the professor rushed past me into whatever lay beyond.

III. The breath from the tomb

Our torches cast a tiny pool of light in which we stood for some time, unprepared for the sight that met our eyes.

The tomb was almost entirely empty, with no treasure, gold, silver, or lapis lazuli, and no fine works of wood or stone. In fact, nothing at all existed in this strange chamber except for a large granite box—obviously a sarcophagus—and the vivid paintings and bas reliefs that covered the walls.

We felt no disappointment at this absence of riches. We felt nothing at all except an overwhelming, awestruck fear at the terrible thing on the wall above the sarcophagus, which froze us all in terrified silence.

It was a painted bas relief that stretched up ten feet to the ceiling of the chamber, and I find it difficult to describe its strange and hideous quality. It consisted almost entirely of a single, enormous depiction of a man, which bore little resemblance to any known form of Egyptian art. Though highly stylized, it had an air of realism, a physical presence that seemed to exist in three dimensions. We all felt that, as we stared, it was somehow coming closer, though never quite reaching us.

The figure depicted was tall and very thin. He appeared to be floating in the air, with no discernible surface beneath him. He was clad in a black cloak that concealed most of his angular figure and his hands were clasped together at his chin as if in prayer, largely concealing his face. But in the long, spindly fingers with their elongated, talon-like nails, he grasped a long, thin, flute-like instrument, which he appeared to be playing with a disconcerting serenity. Above the shrouded head were a few lines of hieroglyphs but nothing more.

The overall impression was, above all, sinister. It was not until I finally broke its spell and saw what surrounded it around and below that I began to tremble.

The figure floated in a void, but a vast mosaic of terribly vivid color and detail surrounded it and stretched out across the tomb walls. The mosaic depicted dozens of human figures with laborious and exacting care—it was the work of years, if not eons—including all manner of human types: men, women, children, farmers, priests, sailors, slaves, nobles, prostitutes, scribes, and every other imaginable profession and station.

This was not unusual, but many of the innumerable figures gazed as one at the great figure with his flute and seemed to dance. They were twisted and turned about by whatever unknowable music the instrument in the raptor-like claws emitted.

Others did not merely dance. They contorted their crazed bodies around one another in the most depraved configurations; some so obscene that our devout workmen covered their eyes at the sight. The figures roiled and surged in an orgiastic frenzy, becoming something that was neither man nor animal, but other creatures with six, eight, or ten limbs, and more besides.

As the mural approached and enclosed the great figure, the horror itself took shape. In a picture of hideous madness, cities burned, mothers devoured their infants, men tore one another asunder with their bare hands, and the Nile disgorged creatures unknown even to the most demented imaginations. Their diseased and deformed contours strongly resembled the bizarre ushabtis we had unearthed mere hours before, and I shuddered to think that these were to be the king’s servants and guides in whatever hideous afterlife he was to enter. Above it all floated that terrible apparition of the king himself—if king he was—whose otherworldly music had driven men mad.

I do not know how long we stood transfixed. At last, one of the workmen broke the spell by murmuring an imprecation in Arabic, which the others quickly repeated. Awoken from his trance, the professor stepped forward and shone his flashlight across the figure and the surrounding walls, seemingly regaining the natural detachment of the scientist.

“Dear God,” I murmured, “what is it?”

“I don’t know,” the professor replied.

“It’s… abominable.”

He did not respond. Instead, he directed his flashlight toward the hieroglyphs that floated above the figure, which we now saw were encased in a royal cartouche.

“Does it say anything?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the professor. “It’s Second Intermediate Period Egyptian. Very strange…” He stepped forward, as if to get a better view. “Isfet djeset,” he murmured.

“What does it mean?”

“Difficult to translate… ‘Isfet’ means something like ‘disorder’; the opposite of ‘ma’at,’ the proper order of things—an essential principle to the Egyptians. The essential principle, in fact. As for ‘djeset,’ it refers to something that approaches, but without haste… I suppose you could translate the phrase as ‘slowly approaching chaos.’ The other phrase is even stranger…”

“Why?”

“It means ‘the faceless god.’ The Egyptians had no faceless god. Quite the opposite, in fact. All their gods had standardized anthropomorphic and animal forms. Perhaps it’s a blanket invocation, like the Greek or Roman idea of ‘the unknown god’—a god not yet known or revealed to mankind. Invoking it would be an attempt to avoid inadvertently offending such a god and thus prompting his wrath. But that was a concept foreign to the Egyptians, so far as I know, and the Second Intermediate Period is far too early for Hellenistic influence.”

He laid his hand on the lid of the sarcophagus and said, “Let’s open it.”

I confess that I shuddered. I had no wish to see whatever lay within that stone vessel of death, and I wish I had obeyed that prudent instinct.

But the professor’s will was law on this expedition, so we all gathered around the sarcophagus, lifted the heavy lid with great effort, and placed it carefully on the chamber floor. I heard the professor gasp, and well he might have done so. We had all expected a royal mummy, with its bejeweled gold case and funerary mask depicting a serene and noble face, inscrutable in the face of the unknown afterlife.

We saw instead a plain wooden case, desiccated by eons of parched air, but it did not depict a human being.

The body appeared anthropomorphic enough, but the funerary mask took the most bizarre and uncanny form. It resembled a jackal, hyena, or even an anteater, with a long, protruding snout that curved slightly downward. The eyes were set to the sides of the doglike head and the coffin had been carefully carved to accommodate a pair of long, rectangular ears. The overall impression was that of an unnerving chimera; an animal composed of familiar elements so combined as to constitute a form unknown to nature and, perhaps, vaguely blasphemous to it.

“It’s hideous,” I said.

“Yes,” the professor agreed. “It is the Set animal. The anthropomorphic form of the god Set or Sutekh—the deity of destruction, the desert, storms, and disorder.” He looked up at the figure and the enigmatic inscriptions on the wall and added: “Slowly approaching chaos…” He turned back to the sarcophagus and murmured: “This was not a cult of Osiris.”

What the professor said next sealed our fate: “We must carry it out to the tent where I can examine it properly.”

I dreaded the task, as I’m sure we all did but for the professor. It proved surprisingly easy, however. The wooden coffin weighed relatively little, and we lifted it from its stone case without much effort. We carried it out through the long corridor with its incomprehensible writing, mounted the stone stairs, and emerged into the sudden light of the blazing desert, for dawn had long since broken. From there, it was only a few hundred yards to our largest tent, which the professor had turned into something like a laboratory. We laid the mummy on the professor’s examination table and waited, with some trepidation, for what we knew would come.

Though his curiosity overcame it, I believe even the professor felt some measure of fear that, within that case, we would find, in corporeal flesh, the blasphemous chimera into whose form the coffin was carved. What we did find was, in the end, something far worse.

We lifted the wooden lid and set it aside. For a moment, we all breathed a sigh of relief because the wrapped object appeared wholly normal, with no sign of inhuman deformity.

The professor lit a small burner and heated a long knife in the midst of the flame. Something of our old trepidation returned, because we knew that the laborious process of cutting each thin layer of the ancient cloth and peeling it back until it revealed the dead flesh beneath was about to begin.

The professor cut and peeled with great care for the better part of an hour, until quite suddenly, we saw a glimpse of the corpse’s brown and wrinkled skin, and he parted the final layer of cloth concealing the body.

The professor alone did not gasp at what we saw. Perhaps, in his strange and prescient way, he knew what we would find. I admit that now, with hindsight, I may have had my own intimations of it. Nonetheless, my heart froze and I was grateful to hear one of the workmen mutter a prayer, though I understood not a word of it but for “Allah.”

I must emphasize again that what lay before us was no chimera. By every indication, it was fully human. In any other circumstances, we would have regarded it as completely normal. However, with what we had already seen, the sight was nearly phantasmagoric in nature: The living image of the floating cloaked figure that adorned the wall of that sepulchral chamber lay before us. And there, in long, talon-like fingers, was the flute with which the figure had driven mankind insane.

We said nothing. I believe that the uncanniness of the thing had struck us dumb; as if a thousand years of time had reached out and gripped us by the throat. The professor put down his knife and walked out of the tent without a word. I followed him, fearing what might become of him in the wake of such an unthinkable revelation.

The wind was up and I found myself struggling after the professor’s receding figure. He seemed unperturbed, walking slowly and steadily toward the perimeter of the oasis. Behind me, I heard the shouts of the workmen, which I chose to ignore, stumbling through the wind until I reached the professor’s side.

He stood at the edge of the oasis where the verdant scrub gave way to sand. He stared silently out at the eastern horizon, seemingly lost in a trance. I placed a hand on his shoulder but he did not move.

“Professor?” I said.

He did not respond, except to raise his hand and point eastward.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

He did not speak. Helplessly, I followed his gaze and saw, just where the sky met the sand, a strange dun-colored haze rising slowly out of the earth.

“It is the sandstorm,” the professor said quietly. “The khamsin. Carried on the winds from the Arabian desert.”

“Should we flee?”

“No. It would overtake us easily. Better to suffer it as best we can.”

He said nothing more. He simply stared forward with his trance-like, expressionless gaze, as if resigned to some fate or unknown doom whose nature was unknown to me, but certainly melancholy, deep, and unnameable.

I realized that the professor could lend us no aid, so I abandoned him to his reverie and returned to the workmen. With a mixture of stuttered Arabic, hand signals, and a few finger-sketches in the already-swirling sand, I managed to convey a plan of action. We rushed about the camp, securing tent flaps with shards of granite seized from the surrounding ruins. Even in the midst of that mad dash to head off the storm, I marveled at the fact that, all these many thousands of years later, use was made of the work of those ancient builders.

By the time we finished, the light had begun to wane. I looked up and saw the brilliant blue sky slowly turning yellow and tan as it filled with sand. A brown haze surrounded the sun, dimming its light and bringing on the close of day with prodigious speed. Having done what we could, the workmen hurried to their tents to wait out the storm. I went back for the professor, concerned that, in his discombobulated state, he might not retreat to his tent but rather remain to face the wrath of the desert alone.

I had not anticipated the fury of the storm, which quickly transformed into a raging gale. The sand battered my face and ground between my teeth, its sharp edges stinging my eyes and its roar rendering me almost deaf to any other sound. The air grew thick and opaque, swallowing the light so that I could see barely two or three feet in front of me through the fine mist of particles, surrounding me with perpetual dusk. I began to feel as if there were no longer a night or a day as I stumbled on through an absolute void.

I do not know how many times I shouted the professor’s name, but the thunder of the wind drowned it in an instant. I began to wonder if I was now walking in endless circles or wandering into the heart of the desert. A gnawing terror rose in me that I might meet the same end as the mad Cambyses’s army, devoured whole by the sands, when I finally came upon him.

The professor had not moved in the slightest. Even the expression on his face seemed unchanged as he stared into the maw of the storm. I grabbed him by the arm and he started and turned to me. His expression instantly transformed into one that I hope never to see again on the face of a human being. His skin turned ashen, as white as an exsanguinated corpse. His eyes widened and glimmered an opaque shade of yellow in the dimming light. His mouth opened and closed several times, but no sound emerged. He began to shake violently, and without further ceremony, I pulled him away from his vigil and dragged him back toward the tents.

He was something very close to dead weight. It took many minutes and much effort to drag him until I nearly fell over the granite block we had used to secure one of the corners of my tent. Groping in what was now almost night, I found the tent opening, tore it free, and pulled the professor inside.

The professor was shivering violently. Without the sun, the desert heat had quickly dissipated, and it was bitterly cold. I wrapped the professor in a blanket and took another for myself. Presently, his tremors eased, and the expression on his face lost its manic pallor, becoming again disconcertingly serene and trance-like.

Then, he began to speak, his voice so soft that, amidst the storm’s tumultuous battering of the tent and the sand seething across its surface, I had to lean in close to catch his words.

“Sutekhmet,” he murmured. “Of course. Of course. I should have known. Set, Seth, Sutekh, it makes no difference. Only a name. And he has many names. Storms, the desert, disorder, the creeping chaos, the dreadful music. Of course. They had to come here. There would have been nowhere else. Nowhere else to worship such a god or such a pharaoh. Did they worship a prisoner? Or were they his? Did they belong to him? Were they but slaves to the faceless god? Dejeret, djeret, isfet djeret, the creeping chaos. No. Osiris? Never. God of the dead? God of the dead? The other god? Unknowable? The one who swallows the sun? No! The beast of the forked tail and the hewn ears! If only I could read the signs. Then, perhaps, I might know. Perhaps. Language. They call that language! Language! But whose? In the abyss, they speak a different tongue. But I wonder… perhaps… with great labor… after all… years. It may take so long. And then… too late? Too late already, perhaps… But I don’t know what… It could be… What is it? Djeret. Isfet. Djeret. Perhaps it was… so long ago… it could have been… Men and gods were closer to each other. The veil between the two worlds was thin. Thinner than today. It’s possible. A god. A god to rule all Egypt. A god to rule all the world. After all, they believed it. Who are we to say? No wonder… No wonder they wiped away his name. Damnatio memoriae. Manetho must have known. Perhaps that was his vengeance. He gave it to the Greeks because he knew. The Greeks knew chaos as well. A poison sewn in papyrus, waiting… Impossible to know. So much I don’t know. But perhaps to Manetho it was just a name carved in stone. All unknowing, he did its bidding. It’s possible. So much is possible… Chaos, and the desert, and the sandstorm. Do you hear it? Do you hear it? Yes. His voice on the wind. He who devours the sun. He who consumes the moon and stars. Ma’at dead and destroyed. Ma’at laid low. Ma’at consumed and devoured. Ma’at in the storm. Ma’at in nothingness. Ma’at in the void. Ma’at is the void. Demon and god become one. If only I could read the signs… If only they could tell me… After so many centuries… an abyss of time… Nothing can be known in time… Time itself… That could have been what they wanted… And for so many centuries? I must read. Somehow, I must read…”

I stared in astonishment as he raved, his eyes wide and alight, his face distorted by the frenzy of incomprehensible words that poured from his mouth. Flecks of gray spittle began to drip from his lips. I could make neither head nor tail of his monologue, which I have attempted to transcribe as accurately as I can from memory; though, God help me, I can understand him now.

Slowly, his passion exhausted itself, and the mass of verbiage trailed away. His face ceased to distend, and as he finally collapsed into silence, his expression became almost serene, as if he had undergone some strange purgation of the self. His eyes drooped, his chin fell onto his chest, and I perceived after a time that he had drifted into sleep. I considered lying him on the ground, but something in me feared even to touch him lest he be seized again by whatever interior frenzy had overcome him.

I felt the same utter exhaustion of body and spirit. I lay down in hope of sleep.

I did sleep, but it was not peaceful. The wind roared and I only dozed as the sand whined and hissed against the tent’s fabric and seeped in through any available opening, however small and narrow. At times, the wind rose and shook the flaps with terrible violence, awakening me, and I feared the tent itself would collapse and we would both be ravaged by the storm, torn to shreds by the razor edge of the whirling sand. I pressed my head against the tarp, as if it might somehow reinforce it against the gale, though I knew this to be utterly futile. If the wind decided to inflict disaster, I was well aware that any effort on our parts would be in vain—however desperate. Of course, in the end, such disaster was inflicted, though we would not know it for some time.

At last, the dreadful wail began to abate and, but for the occasional gust, went silent. I drifted off into sleep and did not wake again until dawn. This was no gift of Morpheus, however, for once again the dream came to me, but now it was far more terrible and grotesque than before. The stars still danced to that terrible melody, but now their constellations took on the forms of the most depraved and demented kind. Intertwined and undulating, the orgiastic orbs writhed and seethed in a chaotic mass as the moon above grew ever larger and engorged with light. It weighed heavy and gibbous, until the gray mottles upon its surface took on the lineaments of eyes, nose, and mouth. At the height of horror, I saw that the moon was now the face of the hideous cloaked figure with the demented flute, shining with heinous luminosity. With all the cosmos driven insane by his demonic music, chaos reigned and madness alone ruled the universe.

I woke from this night terror with my face contorted as if in a scream, but no sound emerged from my lips. Drenched and disoriented, the sweat poured off me into my eyes. The salt stung so painfully that I clenched them shut until it abated. Slowly, the innocuous reality of my surroundings took hold, prompting me to return to myself. A shaft of dawn light shone through the gap in the tent flap. It fell gently upon the form of the professor, still frozen in his sitting position. He seemed to sleep almost peacefully, the steady rise and fall of his breathing reassuring me that he had not left us.

Confused and unsteady on my feet, I emerged from the tent. Everywhere around me was evidence of the storm’s passage. Sand was piled in undulating dunes upon every available surface, half-burying all evidence of the oasis ruins. Two palm trees had split and crashed to the ground. One of our tents had collapsed completely and was covered almost completely by the sand. At the western perimeter of the camp, I found the workmen huddled together whispering to themselves. Before them lay the demolished remains of the professor’s makeshift laboratory. I hurried to their side and saw, as they did, the fearful thing that ended all our efforts.

There, amidst the smashed remains of wood and fabric, was the coffin of Sutekhmet, split and shredded by the wind but still largely intact. But of that strange and terrible mummy with the flute that had invaded my dreams, there was no trace whatsoever.

For a moment, we all struck dumb, but quickly, I felt a wave of revulsion and wanted nothing more than to shut out the sight of the distended gaping emptiness in that cursed wooden box. With the workmen’s aid, I pulled the thing from the sand, clapped the lid back upon it, and threw a shard of torn tent fabric over it to conceal the face of the chimera.

After doing so, the sensation of disgust began to dissipate, and the workmen and I set about salvaging what we could from the wreckage. For well over an hour, we picked through what remained of the tent, hauled papers and instruments from the sand, and even discovered the small box in which the professor had stowed the mysterious ushabtis we had discovered the day before—though it felt as if a lifetime had passed since.

The professor shuffled out of my tent while we rested from our labors and made his slow and laborious way toward us. With the sun behind him, he appeared like a black apparition, and I watched as he stopped at what remained of Sutekhmet’s coffin, pulled off the tarp, and lifted the lid.

Seized again by unreasoning terror, I sprang to my feet and rushed over to him. He put up one hand to stop me, his eyes fixed on the emptiness where the body of the pharaoh had lain for a thousand years before the storm.

“He has escaped,” the professor said. “God help us all.”

He looked up into my face. I almost gasped, because it seemed as if he had become an old man in a single night. His sallow skin and the bags beneath his eyes appeared almost black in the sunlight. The shadows of the storm seemed etched upon his face. His hair appeared white rather than gray, falling in distended clumps about a forehead now streaked with deepening lines. Had I not known better, I would have thought him deathly ill with fever.

I felt I ought to say something, if only to urge him to rest, but I could not break away from that ravaged gaze. He turned away from me, shuffled back to my tent, and disappeared inside.

I now knew that leaving this cursed place as quickly as possible was the only imperative. The workmen were as anxious to leave as I was. I believe that each of us, out of his own superstitions, was now convinced that staying here would be madness or worse. We knew that this blasted oasis possessed some terrible judgment, conjured up out of the sand of its own accord to a secret and malevolent purpose.

I knew as well that, somehow, the coffin of Sutekhmet served that purpose. So, as the workmen gathered up our belongings and a few of the artifacts, I dug a shallow grave for that coffin. I never felt so grateful in my life as when the last spadeful of sand finally covered that terrible chimera—I hoped forever.

After I packed my tent, the professor sat upon the sand, his beard and hair caked with dust, lost in his abyssal trance, as if time itself had become meaningless to him. Nonetheless, he did not resist when I led him to the camels, nor when three of us pushed his deadweight into the saddle, where he sat with neither comment nor comfort.

At last, we began our retreat from that silent and ravaged place. I looked back only once, after we had ridden for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and could see far in the distance the blurry forms of a few palm trees and what remained of that temple of the heathen pharaoh. A few minutes later, it disappeared below the horizon, and I almost wept with relief.

For the rest of our long journey, I kept my eyes locked on the path ahead, occasionally assessing the professor’s condition. He remained inert and unchanged, not saying a word, and I wondered at times if he had, in effect, departed the earth in all but body. I remember nothing else of that endless trek, except for fleeting memories of infinite rock and sand that still, as I write these words, haunt my dreams.

We maintained a good pace and reached Thebes on the third night. First, we lifted the professor from his mount, took him to his tent, and laid him on a proper bed, where he fell asleep immediately. With what I felt was necessary impertinence, I procured the professor’s money belt and paid the workmen the salary they had unquestionably earned and more besides. They were all as shaken as I was, and one of them trembled violently as he took his money. As they departed, one of them stopped and suddenly spoke to me in English.

“Whatever he was,” he said, “Allah will protect us from him.”

I told him that I hoped he was right. He nodded in agreement and then departed with the others.

Then, the immense efforts of recent days and the inexplicable yet vaguely horrible sights I had witnessed finally took their toll on me. I barely managed to stagger back to my tent, collapse on my cot, and sleep at last. A sleep untroubled by dreams of cosmic chaos and that awful moon engorged by who knows what unthinkable and unnameable evil.

I took my leave of the professor the next day. I was absolutely determined to spend not a moment longer than I had to in what now felt like an accursed land. I wanted to see water, concrete, asphalt, green trees, and all the comforts of a civilized nation without a past.

I went to the professor’s tent to tell him as much, but he remained in the oneiric trance that had come over him the night of the storm. He showed little reaction to my resignation, occasionally nodding as I spoke, but he spoke not a word of his own. I had the growing impression that he would never emerge from this reverie, and all my efforts at a friendly departure were for naught.

I told him to send the remainder of my salary to the American embassy in Cairo, caring little whether he would remember to do so, and sincerely wished him well. Then I gathered my things and went in search of transportation. I wanted nothing now but to forget that oasis of death where a pharaoh and his priests had worshipped something that ought never to have been freed from its prison.

Morbid musings followed me as I traveled north in a rickety bus filled with peasants, day workers, and a few itinerant beggars. I did my best to sleep away the long hours on the bumpy, dust-caked roads, for I had no further wish to see the rocky and blasted wasteland around us. To me, the desert was no longer a pure and serene place, but an abode of jinns and night demons rising on the winds to conceal the moon and derange the minds of men.

But my dreams gave me no peace. As I passed in and out of troubled sleep, the great billowing cloud of sand roared up from the desert floor into the sky, blotting out the orbs of light that alone might give succor to man. It was the color of dried blood, of death itself, and as I watched, it spread to cover all Egypt, burying forever the remains of 4,000 years, and then out across the seas and continents, until all the world was interred, and then it pushed out into sidereal space, consuming the planets and the illimitable vacuum, and all the universe became a desert. Even in my sleep, I heard Shelley’s echoing final lines:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I arrived in Cairo in the late evening and returned to the American hotel, carrying a bottle of smuggled whiskey. I drank myself into a stupor as profound as the professor’s trance, then slept for 26 hours.

The harsh ringing of the room telephone awakened me. As I struggled up from sleep, the front desk clerk informed me that a gentleman waited downstairs for me. Thinking it might be a messenger from the embassy bearing the funds to help me escape this damnable Egypt, I unsuccessfully attempted to make myself presentable and unsteadily descended the stairs to the lobby.

The gentleman recognized me on sight, though I did not know him from Adam. I presumed him to be an Arab, though he had no accent and spoke perfect King’s English. He wore an expensive and no doubt tailored suit in the European style, and his manicured teeth grinned beneath a brush mustache. In every way, he was a reassuring presence except for his unreflecting green eyes, which were, for some reason, distinctly unnerving. He asked me to join him in the hotel cafe, and I was not enthusiastic, but I wanted compensation for all the labors I had done and the horrors I had witnessed, and I felt that—at the very least—no harm could be done.

In the haze of hookah smoke and the acrid smell of Egyptian coffee, the man told me he was not from the embassy, but rather a direct emissary of the professor. With little comment, he handed me a thick envelope filled with British pound notes, amounting to my entire salary in cash and probably a great deal more. The man must have perceived my surprise, for he quickly told me the professor was deeply grateful for all my efforts and hoped this clearly insufficient compensation would be acceptable to me. I replied that it was and inquired about the professor’s well-being.

“He is well,” the man said, “but, of course, he is quite exhausted. I believe he plans to take some recuperation on the Riviera, and perhaps return to his discoveries once he has recovered his strength.”

“That’s gratifying to hear,” I replied. “I hope to read of his conclusions and further activities someday.”

At that, the man ceased to be friendly and turned quite solemn and serious. “The professor has one request,” he said. “For the moment at least, he implores you to observe the strictest silence regarding himself, his theories, and your expedition—including the discoveries you witnessed. This is for professional reasons, of course, but there are… personal considerations as well. I’m sure you understand.”

“Sir,” I replied, “I hope that I never see that place or anything we found there, or this cursed country as a whole, ever again. I would not speak of it even without a vow of secrecy.”

The man did not appear offended by my derisory comments about his country. He silently assessed my sincerity for a moment and then said: “Well, that seems satisfactory for all involved.”

He rose, shook my hand, wished me well, and took his leave. As I watched his tall frame disappear into the Cairo night, I thought: Well, that’s the end of it, thank God. I was, of course, quite wrong, though I would not know it for some time.

With the professor’s generosity at my disposal, I decided to return to New York as quickly as possible. I took a boat to Cyprus and then to mainland Greece. I hired a car that brought me to Rome and took a slow train to Paris. With no interest in tourist pursuits, I spent two days isolated in a cheap Left Bank hotel until I could catch a night train to Calais, where I boarded a passenger steamer for the long trans-Atlantic passage.

Throughout the voyage, I kept to myself, rarely venturing on deck except on quiet, rainy evenings when I watched the gauzy sunset over the vast ocean and, once again, gave thanks to God for surrounding me with water rather than desert.

But the vastness of the sea became oppressive in its own way, so I returned to my cabin, hidden from the prying eyes of others who had not seen those things I had seen, nor dreamed of that haunted moon-headed creature with his debauched stars and hideous music. They did not know what I knew and thus, they were alien to me. I felt that the new abyss between us would never be bridged, and there was no point in attempting it.

Upon arriving in New York, I found the nearest flophouse and resumed my solitude. Indeed, I had no choice. For a week, I ran a fever of over 100 degrees, as if my body sought to burn the horrors out of me. Beset by hideous visions of the moon-headed demon and his obscene millions, the droning flute now raised to the howl of the sandstorm, I saw again the billowing maelstrom slowly covering the moonlit world.

At last, my fever broke, and for the first time in weeks, I slept without dreams. I awoke with my mind blessedly clear and my strength largely returned. I hoped that the illness had occasioned some purging of my soul, and I could now resume my life as it had been before the desert and the horror from the tomb.

I now know that hope was in vain, but I did not know it at the time. I felt well enough to face the world and contacted two of my friends who had escaped the pervasive unemployment via the clerical profession. They kindly helped me find a similar position, and I spent the coming months happily contending with dull and quotidian work at a downtown merchant bank—which will herein remain nameless.

IV. The heretic of Alexandria

I read the first reports of Al-Fawdah in the final weeks of 1931. They contained little more than rumors, sensationalistic but vague asides in the yellow press. Then the stories began to bleed into the more reputable publications, becoming more detailed and elaborate, until it was clear that something very strange was happening in far-off places largely unknown to Americans—though not to me.

He initially caught my eye solely because he was an Egyptian, or at least appeared to be, which awakened my dark memories of that country. Soon, I could not help but become fascinated by the mystery and glamor that surrounded his person.

From the melange of early and often contradictory reports, I gleaned that he first came to public notice in Cairo. Likely, he had been haunting the Nile villages for some time, moving through the land like an itinerant fakir. People said that he came out of the desert on a night of the full moon, emerging from the shadow of the pyramids on his way into the outskirts of the city. Eyewitnesses described him as a tall, thin man clad always in a white cloak, wearing a veil that concealed his face entirely. Indeed, many would have taken him for a pious woman were it not for his height and the sound of his voice.

People said that voice was a magnificent instrument; at times, it thundered as a basso profundo, and at others, it pierced yet resonated as a tenor, freezing listeners on the spot. He spoke perfect literary Arabic alongside the Egyptian vernacular and the liturgical language of the Coptic church. As he walked the streets of Cairo and its environs, he gathered crowds of followers who accompanied him wherever he went, imitating his simple white dress and listening with rapt attention to his odd discourses that contained much that was obscure and strange. That was when both followers and observers began to refer to him as Al-Fawdah, though no one knew the origin of the name.

Al-Fawdah’s increasing popularity soon caught the attention of the authorities. The local political and cultural luminaries appeared unconcerned, but the religious establishment, always on the lookout for heresy, took a bleaker view. As the weeks went on, rumors spread in both high and low circles that Al-Fawdah was claiming prophethood and preaching a new doctrine heretical and anathema to Islam. The details of Al-Fawdah’s creed were unknown, though it was speculated that it might involve fealty to another god or, worse still, other gods, and might well involve disturbing antinomian prayers and rituals that invoked all manner of demons and jinns.

Rumors flew from mosque to mosque, and the British authorities, who still ruled Egypt for the sake of Suez, began to fear that violence was imminent. They decided to take preemptive action and arrested Al-Fawdah, conveying him by night to Alexandria, where they hoped he would cause less trouble.

In Alexandria, however, Al-Fawdah came into his own. At the time, people popularly regarded him as a kind of primitive—a would-be prophet from the Middle Ages who bedeviled the modern age. No one imagined that he might prove himself a man of machines. Yet soon, new rumors spread, reports emerged, and finally, confirmation arrived: Al-Fawdah not only possessed machines but machines of great sophistication, force, and power. He began to exhibit them in private and then at mass nocturnal meetings, during which he engaged in spectacular displays of electricity. Before growing crowds, he stood between towering helixiad columns that spat lightning through the broiling Egyptian air in great bolts that slashed above the supplicants’ heads and reached up incandescent pillars toward the sky.

Followers claimed that these primordial energies sometimes touched and infused a supplicant, sending them, man or woman, into torrents of ecstasy and abandon. At times, frenzied dancing would break out, and at its height or spasm, a supplicant would become pure light subsumed by the glow. Followers disagreed as to whether they were destroyed for their sins or ascended to heaven in the form of pure energy.

At other times, the ferocious discharges formed a lattice above Al-Fawdah’s head, where they squirmed and multiplied, finally resolving themselves into images that writhed and moved, taking on all manner of hypnotic and even obscene shapes. This induced in the supplicants a trance of such duration and intensity that many, it was said, were never the same again.

On those nights of endless heat, great processions and marches of these dreaming supplicants, clad in their white cloaks, wandered the streets in hypnotized silence, seemingly without purpose or destination. They were content to wander amidst Al-Fawdah’s dream forever, as if it had become their opiate.

The British authorities in Alexandria quickly became even more worried than their colleagues in Cairo. They wondered, of course, what might happen if these enraptured crowds were ever wielded against them. But even worse was the information that Al-Fawdah now preached a doctrine of sorts to a small circle of initiates. He was already known for his preaching, but agents reported that his creed had taken on a more systematic and sinister cast. In Cairo, he had extemporized; in Alexandria, he espoused a theology.

Al-Fawdah’s theology remained vague, but he appeared to hold that Islam and all other religions were lies told by madmen and fools. Only a select few, often occulted personalities, had ever known the terrible and awesome truth of our universe, and he was—of course—one of those personalities. That truth appeared to contain Gnostic and dualistic elements and posited vast abysses of time during which shadowy forces from the stars made and remade earth again and again. No benevolent god ruled over this creation, but other, insidious intelligences not native to our universe.

From time to time, these intelligences emerged to manipulate and bedevil mankind, driving him to frenzies of ecstasy, rapine, and suicidal violence before disappearing again into the unknown ether. They enjoyed the spectacle of men destroying themselves, but never sought man’s total destruction, for this would deprive them of their plaything, and boredom would overtake their infinite existence.

In the meantime, these intelligences other to the material world haunted men’s dreams, making them terrified of the night and of lonely places. They granted terrible visions to the souls already sufficiently debased, around which a select few constructed cults, covens, and ways of occult magic.

These few, along with all who communed with the other intelligences, received at least a small part of their masters’ power, making them appear to mere mortals as something like gods themselves. Although he never explicitly stated it, it was clear that Al-Fawdah considered himself one of those select initiates, and, it was reported, so did his followers.

Islam had not faced a major heresy for centuries, so it was not surprising that, at first, the pious of Alexandria did not know how to handle a minor one. But by the late summer of 1931, the British became seriously concerned about the prospect of civil violence. It came sooner, perhaps, than they expected.

On a hot night in the last week of August, the call went out from the mosques. Thousands of Muslims poured into the streets with various makeshift weapons and went in search of Al-Fawdah and his followers. Due to their white cloaks, the followers were easy to find, and a terrible slaughter ensued as the streets of the ancient city ran with the blood of massacred heretics. The British scrambled to restore order, with their forces battling the mobs for two days until, on the night of August 29, the incident occurred.

At 9:46 pm, a blast of incandescent white light illuminated the entire coastal district of the city. For a brief moment, the streets became as bright as day, and ships a mile out at sea sighted the glow, as if Alexander’s lost Pharos lighthouse had returned from the dead. A split-second later, the power went out across the entire city, plunging it into darkness but for the light of the full moon. Afterwards, many recalled the terrible pall that then fell over the city, an ominous silence matched with a pervasive sense of dread and doom, as the quiet conquered a city notorious for its cacophony.

All thought of civil disorder was instantly forgotten as the authorities rushed to restore power. They discovered, however, that the main power station had suffered an overload of such severity that the equipment itself either melted completely or was damaged beyond repair. They would have to replace everything before the lights could go back on in Alexandria.

This would have been trouble enough, but almost immediately after, hundreds of frenzied screams shattered the pregnant silence of the city. Police and soldiers rushed to the coastal neighborhoods from which the screams seemed to originate and made the awful discovery.

The mob had driven Al-Fawdah and his surviving followers into that small corner of the city to finish its bloody work. There were signs of looting and general mayhem, but the authorities never knew precisely what transpired, for none had survived to tell the tale.

The British and their auxiliaries discovered a city of death. The streets of the quarter were littered and sometimes piled with bodies, many still clutching their primitive weapons and carrying the remains of their ill-gotten booty. The bodies lay in every possible contortion of horrific suffering, with the agony of their final moments written on their twisted and broken limbs. Beyond that, nothing could be known, for every single body was burned beyond all hope of recognition. This spectacle of horror, never to be forgotten by any who witnessed it, was all that remained of the Alexandrian mob.

The authorities found not a trace of Al-Fawdah and his followers. In one of the nearby squares, they discovered the half-melted remains of two of Al-Fawdah’s machines, now little more than hulks of twisted metal, like the carcasses of great, extinct, and fossilized beasts. All attempts to discern their inner mechanisms proved useless, given the extent of the damage. Precisely what energies they had released and, as the authorities presumed, massacred Al-Fawdah’s persecutors while leaving the surrounding buildings completely undamaged was impossible to discern.

The best guess that could be made was that the machines generated some kind of concentrated lightning devastating to human flesh but harmless to inorganic matter. Reportedly, those high up in the British military establishment expressed concern about the possible strategic implications of such a weapon. However, since analyzing the technology proved futile, the issue vanished into the mammoth bureaucracy with no action taken.

For two months, nothing more was heard of Al-Fawdah. He had seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. However, in early November, he suddenly reappeared in Gibraltar, along with a dozen or so followers. The British quickly moved to interdict his presence, having learned their lesson from Egypt. Al-Fawdah outran them and escaped to southern Spain. There, in a distinctly ironic development, he retraced the steps of his conquering ancestors—acolytes of the very religion that had now sought to destroy him—until he reached Barcelona, where he disappeared again for several weeks.

He reemerged to hold the first exhibition of his machines since his flight from Alexandria. Although it was unclear how he had acquired the funds to rebuild them, rumors suggested heavy involvement from certain nascent political organizations, military figures, and anonymous financiers, all of whom harbored a strong interest in both royalist agitation and the occult.

Well into early 1932, Al-Fawdah held his exhibitions on a weekly basis. There were the now-expected reports of mesmerized crowds, secret teachings, and unsavory rituals but there was no evidence of anything criminal. The exhibitions grew increasingly popular, with crowds numbering well into the thousands. Barcelona is well-known for its liberal attitudes and the authorities proved far more accommodating than the Muslim fanatics of Alexandria. Al-Fawdah faced little criticism or opposition to his activities, except from a small faction of the Communist party, which deemed the whole thing a bourgeois indulgence. As a result, white-cloaked figures became a not uncommon sight on the streets of the city, and when Al-Fawdah finally left Barcelona, he did so entirely of his own accord.

He left, I imagine, because like all showmen, he wanted a bigger stage for himself. It is no surprise, then, that he chose Paris as his destination. A few weeks later, what first brought Al-Fawdah to the attention of the average American took place. This was unsurprising given the spectacular nature of the event, because Al-Fawdah chose to exhibit his machines in the plaza beneath the Eiffel Tower.

The easily excited Parisians were, of course, excited. Many thousands turned out to witness the proceedings and were not disappointed. Al-Fawdah unleashed his lightning, conjured his images, and then, at the supreme moment, directed his bolts toward the iconic structure. Before all Paris, the Eiffel Tower came alight. It glowed before thousands of eyes with a silver illumination as vivid as the full moon, bathing all the city in its eerie light.

The crowd reacted with utter, stunned silence. When Al-Fawdah extinguished the light and ended the proceedings, they all trudged away in some unknown trance, marching in slow and mute meditation through the streets of the capital until they reached the outskirts of Paris and disappeared into the night. No one saw them again until morning, when they straggled home or were found wandering the streets. All were stunned and astounded, and many in states of undress. One and all had no memory of anything that occurred after the great tower sparked to incandescent light.

There had been no crime committed, but the French authorities were thoroughly unnerved by such an unusual phenomenon. The government, already teetering on the edge of collapse and worried about social and political instability, was not pleased with reports of Al-Fawdah’s clandestine contacts with Action Française and other militant nationalist and royalist organizations. It urged the visitor to move on. If he did not do so voluntarily, it was strongly implied, he would find himself very unwelcome in France and perhaps a persona non grata.

Al-Fawdah, as always, did not stay where he was not wanted and quickly decamped for Germany. There, he met with even greater success, holding exhibitions of his machines in both Munich and Berlin. He received an offer to appear at the annual Bayreuth Festival celebrating the works of Wagner, where he performed his wonders of light to the accompaniment of one of the notorious composer’s epic symphonies. It was also at Bayreuth that he reportedly made further political connections, this time with certain organizations and parties noted for their admiration of Wagner’s music.

Once again, the authorities were discomfited. But the Weimar government was weak and unwilling to provoke any of the competing political factions that had, in the past, proven perfectly willing to take their disputes into the streets. Moreover, Al-Fawdah now had supporters and, perhaps, friends in high places. The government did not wish to alienate them, so it left Al-Fawdah unmolested. The Egyptian quickly commenced a long tour of Germany and Austria, becoming a minor celebrity and adding substantial numbers to his growing army of followers.

The press set about trying to discover what it could about Al-Fawdah, as he had now become an object of general public interest. They were frustrated in this endeavor. Al-Fawdah gave no interviews and never spoke to the press at all. His followers were no more forthcoming than he was.

Of his background, nothing at all could be discovered. It could not even be ascertained with any certainty that he was, in fact, Egyptian-born, and he could well have been a native of any other Arab nation. Moreover, Al-Fawdah never once revealed his face to the public, even at his exhibitions, keeping it concealed beneath the white veil that was his calling card.

Thus, the faceless Egyptian left the press helpless to penetrate the aura of mystery surrounding him. In the end, the press simply reported his current activities as best they could.

V. The demon exhibition

This modest press coverage acquainted me with Al-Fawdah’s activities. As I mentioned, my own experiences in Egypt caused me to react to these reports with both revulsion and fascination. For some time, Al-Fawdah would disappear from my mind, but then a newspaper headline or newsreel on his latest endeavors would appear, and I would find myself thinking of little else for several days.

I knew, after all, far better than the prurient writers and consumers of the yellow press what could emerge from that vast desert beyond the pyramids. I both wondered at and feared the forces that Al-Fawdah, with his growing fame, might unleash. At the same time, I knew that these forces could not help but fascinate any human being, especially those of us in the West, who have disenchanted the world with our science. We long, in some secret and heathen way, for all the old gods to come to life again and infuse the world with the magic we have forsaken. And, in a bizarre turn, Al-Fawdah used science to achieve precisely this.

Hence, perhaps, Al-Fawdah’s extraordinary success. In his own country, he was a prophet without honor; but here, he had been embraced by a civilization of heretics. I could not help but be part of that civilization, into which I was born; so I too, against my will, found this new heresiarch irresistibly fascinating.

In early 1932, all of this came to a head when a newsreel informed me that Al-Fawdah would embark on his first trans-Atlantic tour and hold one of his famous exhibitions in New York City.

The news thrilled and terrified me. It was a chance to witness the very thing for which I had, often silently even to myself, harbored such a strange and intermittent fascination. But it also carried with it all the horrors of Egypt, from which I had fled in such desperate haste and sworn never to see again.

I agonized over whether I ought to confront the old demons and attend the exhibition, but I found myself utterly unable to decide. I realized that I likely had, on some level, decided to let time decide for me: The longer I put off a decision, the more likely it would be too late to make any decision. Thus, by default, I would finally escape the spell of the Egyptian.

To my surprise and terror, a week before Al-Fawdah’s New York exhibition, I awoke from a deep sleep beset by troubled dreams, fully clothed with a ticket to the exhibition clutched in my hand.

I lay for some time in unutterable shock. I had no memory whatsoever of what must have been a long night’s journey to procure the coveted item. And how did I pay for it, since a brief inspection of my wallet showed that no money was missing?

At that point, I ought to have finally come to my senses, torn the cursed thing to pieces, and put a match to the remains. That I did not is indefensible. But I surmise that some malady of the soul had settled over me, as it settled on the professor the night of the sandstorm and his mind wandered far afield from the realms of the sane into a living dream. Whatever the reason, I placed the ticket in a small box on my dresser and, though I made no conscious decision, knew that I would use it.

The moment of truth arrived on one of New York’s unbearably hot summer nights. Like the desert of cursed Egypt, the air heated to a white-hot, broiling state, but unlike that arid wasteland, the Manhattan atmosphere was filled with vapor. Those who braved it walked through a sticky mass that smelled of brine and refuse. And how many of us walked! When I reached the heart of the city, I realized I was only one among a great immensity. Hundreds, if not thousands, of others like me, all in their finest suits, hats, and dresses, made their way to the Axis Mundi in the sea of skyscrapers where Al-Fawdah would appear. And above us all, the great full moon ascended in the sky.

When I finally entered the vast theater, saw the multitude, and heard the roar of their assembled voices. I felt that I at last understood what the great triumphs of the Caesars and the bloody festivities of the Colosseum must have been like. Here too was the electric energy of the frenzied crowd, who knew not quite what they had come to see, but knew well who would be its herald and harbinger. They were all here for one man. They wished to reassure themselves that he was real, assess the measure of his gifts, behold what wonders he might conjure from his machines, and perhaps decide whether to repose their highest hopes and even the future of their souls upon him.

Indeed, many among the thousands already wore the white cloak of Al-Fawdah’s most dedicated acolytes. And how many more, I wondered, would wear it before the full moon set that night?

Suddenly, the lights were extinguished and the roar of the crowd instantly silenced. The curtain opened, revealing two great columns, each at least 20 feet tall, composed of a mad web of interlocking pipes, gears, mirrors, and metallic shapes whose purpose I could not even begin to guess. The overall effect was of some monstrous idol constructed by an insect civilization. When the columns suddenly glowed a pulsating white and we heard the thunderous crackle of electricity, the crowd gasped as one, as if that motley totem had come alive before their eyes.

From the top of the column, two immense bolts of what looked like lightning burst forth. They reached out to one another and met above the center of the stage, forming a glowing orb pale as the desert moon. Bolts of streaming light snaked up the columns and fed the orb with their incandescence.

Then, the moon-orb illuminated the man himself. Al-Fawdah stood at center stage, tall and thin as described, clad from head to toe in a white cloak that glowed in the radiance of his lightning. A long veil covered his face, as it might a woman or a leper, and he clutched his hands together atop his chest. I expected wild applause to break out, but the crowd was utterly silent.

Al-Fawdah raised his arms, and the lightning reached out for the tips of his fingers. It illuminated a semi-circle of white-cloaked figures surrounding the Egyptian wizard, who were undoubtedly his most devoted inner circle of followers. The lightning caressed them with its long luminescent branches as Al-Fawdah moved his arms and hands like a conductor or ancient fakir. As he did so, the lightning danced for him, churning and roiling until it formed strange and unnameable configurations and, finally, recognizable shapes.

In that churning and shimmering lightning, we suddenly saw all manner of obscene and terrible images: humans disporting themselves in every possible manner; acts of heinous and diseased cruelty; great fires and floods consuming thousands if not millions of souls. The shuddering memories of the hideous mural I had seen in the monstrous tomb cascaded down upon me.

Then, a white lunar terror seized me in its talons. In a fleeting moment, that hideous light became strong enough to pierce the opaque white veil of the Egyptian, and I alone saw what I knew to be Al-Fawdah’s true face: The very face I had seen when we removed the terrible mask of the Set animal, parted the wrappings of 3,000 years, and beheld the decayed visage of the pharaoh Sutekhmet.

At the very same moment, as I sat paralyzed in my seat, the crackling and wailing of the lightning suddenly merged into one and became a solid, high, and wailing melody. It was the melody I had dreamed so many times. The hideous music emitted by the flute of the moon-headed demon who had driven the universe mad.

The hairs on my body stood upright; my mouth opened but no sound emerged; my teeth ground together with furious violence; and my nails pierced my palms and drew blood. Yet, I could not move. For a moment, it seemed there was no escape from the demonic sight before me.

I believe I might have sat there forever if I had not seen the other face. Again, the light reached a climax of illumination, and for a split-second, it unveiled the faces of Sutekhmet’s followers as if at high noon on a summer’s day. And there, at the right hand of the pharaoh, it illuminated the face of the emissary who had come to me in Cairo and handed me a fortune in exchange for my silence.

This revelation, while seemingly less terrible than the first, finally broke the spell that the tomb had cast upon me. I tore myself from my seat, lurched upright, and stumbled through the dark in search of escape. When I burst at last into the thick and watery air of a world I now knew to be mad, I sank to my knees upon the filthy sidewalk of a cursed city and screamed.

VI. Look upon my works…

I remember nothing of what immediately followed. But the sight of a madman shrieking incoherently on a Manhattan street corner drew the police’s attention, and a few hours later, I awoke to a policeman generously and politely helping me up the stairs to my apartment.

I mumbled my thanks as I fumbled for my keys, and he advised me to avoid excessive consumption of strong drink in the future, or I might find myself in the drunk tank for the night rather than escorted home. I nodded, collapsed into my apartment, dragged myself to bed, and passed again into unconsciousness.

In the small hours of the morning, I awoke but remained unable or unwilling to rise for some time. But I knew what I had to do.

Only the professor, whom I had sworn never to see or speak of again, could possibly explain—if explanation there was—the demonic vision I had seen. I had no idea where he might be or if he was still living at all. But if he could be found, I must find him. I could no longer hide from the horrors I had seen in the desert, the secrets of the sandstorm, or the awful evidence of the millennia-dead pharaoh’s face beneath the veil. I knew it had been no mad delusion; nor was the sight of Sutekhmet’s elusive emissary. Let men call me mad. The professor would not, and perhaps he would know how all of this might be brought to an end and the demon consigned back to his tomb.

As soon as the clock struck nine, I picked up the telephone and wrangled with a surly operator for a few minutes before she finally connected me with the Archeology Department of Davis University. I asked to speak to the head of the department and received instructions to call back at noon. After pacing my apartment for three hours, I called again and spoke to Professor Horace Danforth, who informed me that Professor Deschanel had resigned with a stipend the year before. I told him of my adventures with the professor in Egypt—omitting anything that might smack of the fantastic—and he responded enthusiastically, saying the professor had once or twice spoken of me with considerable admiration.

Convinced of my veracity, he confided in me that the professor’s resignation was a discreet means of dismissal. Sadly, the professor had suffered a total nervous collapse six months after our expedition and was now confined to a sanitarium. Emphasizing the importance of speaking with the professor, I asked Danforth for the name and location of the place. After a moment’s hesitation, he told me that he did not know the name, but it was located just outside Sarasota, Florida, and there could not be many such establishments in the area.

However, he strongly advised me against visiting the professor, who was beset by troubling and disturbing delusions, making it painful and distressing to see him in such a state.

“What a mind is here o’erthrown,” he quoted to me. “Best to remember him as he was.”

I told Danforth that I would consider his advice, and our conversation ended.

I quickly called my place of employment and requested a week’s vacation, effective immediately. Having never asked for more than a day off in the past, they had little choice but to grant my request. I then packed a small valise, took a cab to Grand Central Station, procured a ticket, and within three hours was in a sleeping car heading inexorably south.

I passed long hours in that small compartment, alone with my swirling thoughts. I sought to lose myself in the scenery rushing by my window, but despite the verdant green, I saw only the terrible desert of tan and gray, lifeless and gaunt. So, all the great beauty of trees and earth seemed to me only the lone and level sands stretching far away. And out of those sands, I knew, the storm would come again, and with it the terrible cloaked figure with his head that was the moon and his hideous and dancing stars, all howling like the fingers of the khamsin.

When I finally arrived in Sarasota, I was grateful to escape that moving tomb of a train. I got directions to the sanitarium, which was well known in the area, and hired a car to take me the last few miles to my destination.

I arrived in the late morning, approaching noon. The Florida air was even more humid and close than on that terrible night when I saw Sutekhmet again in the flesh, and all around me was the impossible verdant green.

The sanitarium was palatial and I was almost happy for the professor as I passed through the gates and parked on the gravel before the whitewashed doors. At least he had found a pleasant refuge from all our horrors.

The attendants at the front desk proved reluctant to grant me access, so I lied profusely, telling them that I was a nephew from New York who had not seen the professor for many years. I said I was most anxious to check on his condition because my own mother had taken ill and feared that she might meet her end before seeing her dear brother once again. Perhaps because my desperation was not feigned but all too real, they chose to believe me.

A nurse led me down a long, winding hallway that branched off into dozens of labyrinthine corridors where, I imagined, the afflicted were confined. The hallway was deathly quiet until a distant but prolonged scream pierced the silence, to which the nurse showed no reaction whatsoever.

The nurse finally opened a pair of double doors and led me out into a small courtyard bathed in sunshine and the smell of honeysuckle. An old man dozed in a wheelchair, his head drooping down to his chest and a line of spittle dripping from the side of his mouth. A young woman sat on a stone bench holding a flower and shivered as if she were naked on an Arctic evening. And a white-haired figure reposed on a deck chair, staring off into a small copse of trees.

The nurse pointed to the figure, and I thanked her. I approached with caution, irrationally terrified that the two lunatics nearby would leap up and attack me. No such thing occurred. It was wholly peaceful and almost silent, except for the buzz of insects. The professor, wrapped in a blanket despite the heat and his hair and beard now snow white, looked up at me.

He smiled. “Oh,” he said very quietly. “It’s you, is it?”

“I need to speak to you,” I said.

“There’s too much to say.”

“I know almost the entire story. At least, the most important part. But I need to know the rest.”

“Ah, how it all turns out.” He chuckled to himself.

“Do you know?”

“I knew the night of the khamsin.”

“When you saw the empty coffin.”

“No, that was the next morning, remember? I knew long before. No storm like that comes out of the desert unbidden.”

“He who scours the desert.”

“Yes. Yes, exactly…”

“Did you send the man to Cairo?” I asked.

“Cairo?” He looked puzzled. “I don’t remember sending anyone to Cairo… I may have. I don’t remember very much from those days. The days immediately… after. I may have done many things. But it might have been them…”

“Them?”

“One of his agents.”

“Agents?”

“Oh, he has many agents. The cult survived, of course. They’re very loyal. After all, they’ve been waiting for a long time.”

He raised himself up in his chair and leaned closer to me.

“You think I was mad that night in the desert,” he said. “But I remember every word I said. Remember what I told you: ‘If only I could read it!’ Well, I did. It took me months, months that broke my health and perhaps my mind for good and all, but once I found the grimoire, it was simple, effortless!”

“The grimoire?” I asked, fearing he would descend into a babbling trance just as he had long ago amidst the sand.

He waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter. The point is this: I could read it. I took rubbings! Miles of them! And I read them! The book! The book of Sutekhmet!”

He coughed violently, sat back in his chair, and took several deep breaths.

“Don’t excite yourself,” I said.

“No, no…” he replied in a hoarse whisper, “I mustn’t.”

He calmed himself for a moment, and when he spoke again, he used a firm if rasping tone: “The cult served him in all things. They couldn’t keep his body alive, the god didn’t will it. But they kept the faith and kept their guard, until the armies of Christ destroyed them. But enough of them escaped the sword. They waited for centuries, millennia, passing it all down from initiate to initiate, until the time came. By then, of course, the location of the tomb had been forgotten, but they knew that sooner or later, with all those men like me digging around… And they were clever. I never bothered to ask why the money came from such obscure sources.”

“The money?”

“For my work, young man. Expeditions are expensive. They had centuries to accumulate the money, and when the time came… You ought to know who’s paying your bills, but I was so gripped by the whole thing. I never asked. I should have. ”

“What do they want?” I asked.

“Want? To serve him, of course.”

“To what end?”

“You mean, what does he want.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“You saw it yourself, on the wall of the tomb.”

“The mural.”

“Of course. He wants to drive men mad.”

“Why?”

“I think that the reports are true,” he replied. “He serves other gods—heaven knows what they really are. It pleases them to watch us destroy ourselves. I imagine it pleases him as well. Remember what they called him, what he called himself: Isfet djeset. The creeping chaos. He who scours the desert, the faceless god, Sutekhmet, Sekharos… All these names… But I know his true name. The grimoire revealed it to me…”

His voice trailed away into a faint mumble, and I leaned close to hear it. He repeated a single, incomprehensible word as if it were a mantra: “Nyarlathotep. Nyarlathotep. Nyarlathotep…” And then that too faded away.

“What can we do?” I asked.

“Do? Nothing. No man can stand against a god.”

“Prometheus did.”

“Prometheus…” he almost laughed. “A lie. A myth. A story. Although perhaps… perhaps I believe in stories now. At least, a little.”

“If we can do nothing, then…”

“What’s about to happen?”

“Yes.”

His expression became very solemn and he turned away from me, staring off into the distant trees. “It’s already happening,” he said. “Don’t you see it? The world has become an armed camp. Madmen are seizing powers greater even than the pharaohs. Fools are worshipping men as if they were gods. It will require very little to set us to killing each other, burning our fields and cities, raping our women and children, dying of thirst and hunger, smashing all our great works of centuries to pieces, pestilence and poison and death… Rivers of blood will fill the oceans. And to those who survive, we will bequeath desolation. Yes, yes… that’s how it’s going to be. That’s how we want it, I suppose.” He stopped for a moment and then whispered: “God forgive us. If we hadn’t released him…”

“We couldn’t have known.”

“No, you’re right, we couldn’t have known. But you know, even if we had, it wouldn’t have stopped me. That’s how mad our species is. Just to know whether it was true or not, I would have done it.”

His eyes closed and his breathing turned deep and regular. For a moment, I thought he was asleep. Then, without opening his eyes, he said: “Whatever you decide to do, be careful. Sometimes people ask after me. People I don’t know. Perhaps it’s nothing. On the other hand…”

He said nothing more and, after a moment, began to snore. I stood up, put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him, and then took my leave.

I stared out during the bleak journey back to New York at a world that was not desert, but full, fertile, and green. Yet I knew that all of it would soon be drenched in blood and consumed by fire. I saw my fellow passengers and wondered how many of them Sutekhmet’s wrath would consume. How many would be scoured from the desert that the heretic pharaoh himself would create? I wondered for myself as well; wondered if I, as young and strong as I was, could survive the overturning of the world. As the professor had said, who was I to stand against an evil that had already survived 3,000 years?

When I exited Grand Central Station, I looked up and saw men swarming over the frame of one of the city’s new skyscrapers, raising the girders and welding the bolts into place. I thought: They’re insane. Only madmen would think there was any purpose in building anything anymore.

A week ago, the professor died after a fall in the sanitarium hallway. A fall… perhaps. He was a frail old man. But I wonder. He had told me himself that the cult still lived and the pharaoh had his agents. For the last three days, I have sensed, several times, with a feeling now hardened to conviction, that someone is following and watching me. Strange faces repeat themselves, and shadows lurk in alleyways and around dark corners. So, I have no choice. If I do not act, I do not know if I will remain in this world.

I do not know whether the world has long to wait. I have seen them marching in Paris, London, and Berlin, and I sense the pharaoh’s hand behind them. The gleaming uniforms, the blazing lights, the frenzied crowds… It is only a matter of time before the sandstorm stretches its dun fingers across the sky and Sutekhmet again sets men to destroying each other.

I know from the newsreels that he is in Berlin at the invitation of his friends in high places. I have the ticket in my pocket and the revolver in my valise. I will cross the ocean and seek him out. If I can, I will put a bullet in his brain. If his body is mortal, then for a time at least, I will rid the world of him. If not, then I will at least have tried. It will then be up to the mighty to decide whether they will look upon his works and despair.