Collected Fiction Volume 2 (1926-1930): A Variorum Edition (67 page)

***

There must, Lord Northam whispered, have been something wrong at the start; but it would never have come to a head if he had not explored too far. He was the nineteenth Baron of a line whose beginnings went uncomfortably far back into the past—unbelievably far, if vague tradition could be heeded, for there were family tales of a descent from pre-Saxon times, when a certain Cnaeus
^[10]
Gabinius Capito, military tribune in the Third Augustan Legion then stationed at Lindum in Roman Britain, had been summarily expelled from his command for participation in certain rites unconnected with any known religion. Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon a
^[11]
cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the west that had sunk,
^[12]
leaving only the islands with the raths
^[13]
and circles and shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest. There was no certainty, of course, in the legend that Gabinius had built an impregnable fortress over the forbidden cave and founded a line which Pict and Saxon, Dane and Norman were powerless to obliterate; or in the tacit assumption that from this line sprang the bold companion and lieutenant of the Black Prince whom Edward Third created Baron of Northam. These things were not certain, yet they were often told; and in truth the stonework of Northam Keep did look alarmingly like the masonry of Hadrian’s Wall. As a child Lord Northam had had peculiar dreams when sleeping in the older parts of the castle, and had acquired a constant habit of looking back through his memory for half-amorphous scenes and patterns and impressions which formed no part of his waking experience. He became a dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying; a searcher for strange realms and relationships once familiar, yet lying nowhere in the visible regions of earth.
^[14]

Filled with a feeling that our tangible world is only an atom in a fabric vast and ominous, and that unknown demesnes press on and permeate the sphere of the known at every point, Northam in youth and young manhood drained in turn the founts of formal religion and occult mystery. Nowhere, however, could he find ease and content; and as he grew older the staleness and limitations of life became more and more maddening to him. During the ’nineties he dabbled in Satanism, and at all times he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which seemed to promise escape from the close vistas of science and the dully unvarying laws of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly’s chimerical account of Atlantis he absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of Charles Fort enthralled him with their vagaries. He would travel leagues to follow up a furtive village tale of abnormal wonder, and once went into the desert of Araby to seek a Nameless City of faint report, which no man has ever beheld. There rose within him the tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly at the back of his memory. It might be in the visible world, yet it might be only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held within his own half-explored brain that cryptic link which would awaken him to elder
^[15]
and future lives in forgotten dimensions; which would bind him to the stars, and to the infinities and eternities beyond them.

Editor’s Note:
HPL’s A.Ms. survives and was the basis of the first appearance, in
Leaves
(1938). At the bottom of the first page of the A.Ms., upside down, is the following sentence: “Writing on what the doctor tells me is my deathbed, my most hideous fear is that the man is wrong. I suppose I shall seem to be buried next week, but [. . .]” It is now my belief that this is either an incomplete initial draft of the current fragment or (more likely) an altogether unrelated fragment. It has been crossed out in the A.Ms.; the indication “(
foregoing deleted
)” is presented in
Leaves
but not in
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales.

A = A.Ms. (JHL); B =
Leaves
2 (1938): 107–10; C =
Dagon and Other Macabre Tales
(Arkham House, 1965), 336–39. Copy-text: A.

1
. “Necronomicon”.] Necronomicon. A, B;
Necronomicon.
C

2
. poring] pouring B

3
. under crypts, hewn] under-crypts, hwen B; under-crypts, hewn C

4
. “Necronomicon”] Necronomicon A, B;
Necronomicon
C

5
. these] them B, C

6
. ludicrously] ridiculously B, C

7
. strange,] strange B, C

8
. whispers,] whispers B, C

9
. ***]
om.
C

10
. Cnaeus] Luneus B, C

11
. a] the C

12
. sunk,] sunken, A, B, C

13
. raths] roths B, C

14
. of earth.] of Earth. B; of the Earth. C

15
. elder] Elder B, C

Original title “Al Azif”
^[1]
—
azif
^[2]
being the word used by the Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) supposed
^[3]
to be the howling of daemons.

Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá,
^[4]
in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa A.D. 700.
^[5]
He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia—the Roba el Khaliyeh or “Empty Space” of the ancients—and
^[6]
“Dahna” or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs,
^[7]
which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the “Necronomicon” (“Al Azif”)
^[8]
was written, and of his final death or disappearance (A.D. 738)
^[9]
many terrible and conflicting things are told. He is said by Ebn Khallikan (12th century biographer
^[10]
) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen the fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town
^[11]
the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind.
^[12]
He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities
^[13]
whom he called Yog-Sothoth
^[14]
and Cthulhu.
^[15]

In A.D.
^[16]
950 the “Azif”,
^[17]
which had gained a considerable though
^[18]
surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age, was secretly translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople under the title “Necronomicon”.
^[19]
For a century it impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts, when it was suppressed and burnt by the patriarch Michael. After this it is only heard of furtively, but (1228) Olaus Wormius made a Latin translation later in the Middle Ages, and the Latin text was printed twice—once in the fifteenth
^[20]
century in black-letter
^[21]
(evidently in Germany) and once in the seventeenth (probably Spanish);
^[22]
both editions being without identifying marks, and located as to time and place by internal typographical evidence only. The work, both Latin and Greek,
^[23]
was banned by Pope Gregory IX.
^[24]
in 1232,
^[25]
shortly after its Latin translation, which called attention to it. The Arabic original was lost as early as Wormius’ time, as indicated by his prefatory
^[26]
note;
*
^[27]
and no sight of the Greek copy—which was printed in Italy between
^[28]
1500 and 1550—has been reported since the burning of a certain Salem man’s library in 1692. A translation made by Dr. Dee was never printed,
^[29]
and exists only in fragments recovered from the original manuscript.
^[30]
Of the Latin texts now existing one (15th century
^[31]
) is known to be in the British Museum under lock and key, while another (17th century
^[32]
) is in the Bibliothèque
^[33]
Nationale at Paris. A seventeenth-century
^[34]
edition is in the Widener Library at Harvard, and in the library at
^[35]
Miskatonic University at Arkham; also
^[36]
in the library of the University of Buenos Aires.
^[37]
Numerous other copies probably exist in secret, and a fifteenth-century
^[38]
one is persistently rumoured
^[39]
to form part
^[40]
of the collection of a celebrated American millionaire. A still vaguer rumour
^[41]
credits the preservation of a sixteenth-century
^[42]
Greek text in the Salem family of Pickman; but if it was so preserved, it vanished with the artist R. U. Pickman, who disappeared early
^[43]
in 1926. The book is rigidly suppressed by the authorities of most countries, and by all branches of organised
^[44]
ecclesiasticism. Reading leads to terrible consequences. It was from rumours
^[45]
of this book (of which relatively few of the general public know) that R. W.
^[46]
Chambers is said to have derived the idea of his early novel “The King in Yellow”.
^[47]

———————

“Al Azif”
^[48]
written circa A.D. 730
^[49]
at Damascus by Abdul Alhazred
^[50]

Tr. to
^[51]
Greek A.D. 950 as “Necronomicon”
^[52]
by Theodorus Philetas

Burnt
^[53]
by Patriarch Michael 1050 (i.e.,
^[54]
Greek text).
^[55]
Arabic text now lost.
^[56]

Olaus
^[57]
translates Greek
^[58]
to
^[59]
Latin 1228
^[60]

1232—Latin ed. (and Greek)
^[61]
suppressed
^[62]
by Pope
^[63]
Gregory IX.
^[64]

14…
^[65]
Black-letter printed edition (Germany)
^[66]

15…
^[67]
Greek text printed in Italy
^[68]

16…
^[69]
Spanish reprint
^[70]
of Latin text
^[71]

*
. There is, however, a vague account of a secret copy appearing in San Francisco during the present century, but later perishing by fire.

Editor’s Note:
The original A.Ms. was written on the back of a letter from William Bryant dated 27 April 1927. At some point HPL must have prepared another A.Ms. (or possibly a T.Ms.); he sent it to Wilson Shepherd in early 1937: “Since you seem to be interested, I’ll enclose an outline copy of that ‘history’—which is of course merely a lot of mock-scholarship cooked up about a book which does not exist” (HPL to Wilson Shepherd, 21 January 1937; ms., JHL). Wilson prepared his own T.Ms. (now at JHL), but it is full of errors. His published version duplicates these errors. Bookseller L. W. Currey once sold a T.Ms. that appears to have been prepared by HPL (it has his handwritten notation “please return” in the upper left-hand corner, and the typeface, so far as it is legible, appears to be his); but Currey reproduced only the first page of the T.Ms. on his website. This T.Ms. contains the two passages that are not present in the original A.Ms. Later publications use the title “History and Chronology of the
Necronomicon.
”

Texts: A = A.Ms. (JHL; also reproduced in facsimile in
Lovecraft at Last
[Arlington, VA: Carrollton-Clark, 1975], 104–5]); B = T.Ms. (formerly in the possession of L. W. Currey [p. 1 only]); C =
A History of the Necronomicon
(Oakman, AL: Rebel Press, [1937]). Copy-text: B (and A after B ends).

1
. “Al Azif”]
Al Azif
A, B, C

2
. azif
]
Azif
B, C

3
. supposed] suppos’d A

4
. Sanaá,] Sanna, C

5
. A. D. 700] 700 A.D. A; A.D. 700. C

6
. ancients—and] ancients and B, C

7
. the Roba . . . Arabs,] (The Roba . . . Arabs) C

8
. “Necronomicon” (“Al Azif”)] Necronomicon (Al Azif) A, B;
Necronomicon
(
AL AZIF
) C

9
. (A.D. 738)] (738 A.D.) A; A. D. 738 C

10
. century biographer] cent. biographer A; century biography C

11
. town] city C

12
. mankind.] mankind. (Editors Note: A full description of the nameless city, and the annals and secrets of its one time inhabitants will be found in the story THE NAMELESS CITY, published in the first issue of Fanciful Tales, and written by the author of his outline). C

13
. entities] Entities C

14
. Yog-Sothoth]
Yog-Sothoth
C

15
. Cthulhu.] Cthuthu. C