The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (79 page)

72
Petra is the Greek name (meaning simply “rock”) for an ancient city in the southern desert of modern-day Jordan, founded by the Edomites late in the second millennium B.C.E. It is probably to be identified with the biblical city of Sela. It was conquered by the Nabataeans around 312 B.C.E. and then by the Romans in 106 C.E. The Snake Tomb is a tomb, built by the Nabataeans, carved out of a mountain and surmounted by the figure of a coiled snake.

73
Euclid was a mathematician who flourished around 300 B.C.E. in Greece and wrote the
Stoicheia
(
Elements
), a landmark work on the principles of geometry. HPL's tales contain frequent references to “non-Euclidean” geometry, especially in architecture.

74
Gymnosperm:
now termed Pinophyta: “Ancient division of seed-bearing vascular plants extending from the Devonian to Recent” (CNH).
Conifer:
literally, “cone-bearer”; now classified under the term Pinatae: “The largest group of extant Gymnosperms; usually evergreen shrubs and trees” (CNH).

75
Futurism was a short-lived artistic movement founded by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti in 1909. It purported to address directly the phenomena of the modern world (especially machinery, speed, and violence) by attempting to depict movement rather than static still life. Although it had died out by around 1916, its principles were incorporated in part by the Dadaists and Vorticists. HPL satirized the movement in a poem, “Futurist Art” (1917).

76
This idea of art as depicting the history of an alien species was first used by HPL in “The Nameless City”: “Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural painting whose lines and colours were beyond description. . . . I thought I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a mighty sea-coast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it” (D 104-5).

77
The period of the dinosaurs is thought to extend from roughly 200 to 65 million years ago (the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods). The first archaic mammals appeared roughly 190 million years ago.

78
Minoan Crete refers to the pre-Greek civilization that had been established upon the island of Crete from c. 3000 to 1000 B.C.E. The name Minoan was coined by Sir Arthur Evans from Minos, the mythical king of Crete; the Minotaur (“the bull of Minos”) was a monster said to dwell in a labyrinth at the palace of Minos at Knossos. Bull-leaping and bull-baiting were common sports in Minoan culture.

79
This passage is a reworking of a parallel one in “The Nameless City,” where an investigator similarly encounters depictions of anomalous nonhuman entities on the walls of an underground temple: “These creatures, I said to myself, were to the men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians” (D 105). The wolf had been an important symbol in Roman culture from the earliest times, as the Romans fostered the myth of their founders Remus and Romulus being nurtured by a she-wolf. The eagle was considered sacred to Jupiter; the figure of an eagle surmounted the standards of the Roman legions.

80
“Flashlights” at this time referred primarily to the artificial light used in taking photographs at night or in dark rooms, but could also refer to the photographs so taken; it is this latter meaning that HPL uses here.

81
The luminiferous (“light-bearing”) ether was a conception of nineteenth-century science, derived ultimately from Aristotle. Believing that light could not travel through a vacuum, physicists thought that an ether—what Ernst Haeckel termed “an extremely attenuated medium, filling the whole of space outside of ponderable matter”—was required to allow the particles (as they were then conceived) of light to travel through space. See Ernst Haeckel,
The Riddle of the Universe
, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), pp. 225-28. Einstein's theory of relativity was the deathblow to the ether, and it soon dropped out of physics; but in 1936 HPL heard a lecture by Prof. Dayton C. Miller who continued to deny Einstein and assert the existence of the ether (see SL 5.255). The idea of the Old Ones flying through the ether on wings strikes us as ridiculous, but HPL used the same idea for the fungi from Yuggoth in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (see CC 234); this is what HPL here refers to as “curious hill folklore . . . told me by an antiquarian colleague” (i.e., Albert N. Wilmarth).

82
A common attribute of HPL's extraterrestrial species. Cf. “The Whisperer in Darkness” on the fungi from Yuggoth: “Their brain-capacity exceeds that of any other surviving life-form” (CC 234). Cf. also “The Shadow out of Time” on the Great Race: “their intelligence was enormously greater than man's” (DH 393).

83
This single sentence points to a central concern in HPL's later political philosophy: the psychological and cultural effects of mechanized industrialism upon human beings. In 1929 he wrote: “Mechanical invention has, for better or for worse, permanently altered mankind's relationship to his setting & to the forces of nature generally; & has just as inevitably begun to produce a new type of organisation among his own numbers as a result of changed modes of housing, transportation, manufacture, agriculture, commerce, & economic adjustment” (SL 2.280-81). In speaking of the Old Ones' abandonment of mechanization, HPL echoes what he had said of the alien species in “The Mound” (1929-30): “Many of the old mechanical devices were still in use, though others had been abandoned when it was seen that they failed to give pleasure . . . Industry, being found fundamentally futile except for the supplying of basic needs and the gratification of inescapable yearnings, had become very simple. Physical comfort was ensured by an urban mechanisation of standardised and easily maintained pattern . . .” (HM 134).

84
Shoggoths were first cited in “Night-Gaunts,” sonnet XX of
Fungi from Yuggoth
: “And down the nether pits to that foul lake / Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep” (AT 72). Nearly simultaneously they appear (without being named) in “The Mound”: “. . . when the men of K'n-yan went down into N'kai's black abyss with their great atom-power searchlights they found living things—living things that oozed along stone channels and worshipped onyx and basalt images of Tsathoggua. But they were not toads like Tsathoggua himself. Far worse—they were amorphous lumps of viscous black slime that took temporary shapes for various purposes” (HM 141).

85
Cf. the Great Race in “The Shadow out of Time”: “They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water” (DH 399).

86
Cf. the Great Race in “The Shadow out of Time”: “Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents” (DH 399).

87
This sentence suggests that HPL himself had converted to a moderate, non-Marxist socialism by this time. In July 1931, speaking of the effects of “technological unemployment” (whereby machines have permanently replaced human beings in many occupations), HPL states that the artificial shortening of working hours for all individuals is the only bulwark against a revolt of the unemployed. “If the existing social order is to last, more money must be distributed in some way or other, regardless of normal principles of profit. Socialistic measures like those already in force in England—old age pensions & unemployment insurance—the so-called ‘dole'—will be as necessary as fire-engines at a fire” (SL 3.386-87).

88
This theory of the moon's origin was commonly held in HPL's day, although ironically it was the continental drift theory, which HPL here also embraces (see n. 89), that cast doubt on it, since continental drift renders the Pacific Ocean an ephemeral feature in geological time. The theory is now, however, regarded as highly unlikely, at least in the form expressed here. Currently it is believed that, around 4 billion years ago, a glancing blow from some planetary body about the size of Mars caused a large cloud of fragments to be ejected from the earth, which eventually coalesced into the moon.

89
HPL was in a distinct minority in supporting the continental drift theory, as it was doubted by many geologists. It must also be stated that the proponents of continental drift had at this time failed to provide a proper rationale for the theory; such a rationale was not forthcoming until the 1960s. In 1910 Frank Bursley Taylor (1860-1938) published a paper, “Bearing of the Tertiary Mountain Belt on the Origin of the Earth's Plan,” in the
Bulletin of the Geological Society of America
, outlining the theory. But it was the German geologist Alfred Lothar Wegener (1880-1930) who became the theory's chief exponent: he delivered a paper in 1912 (almost certainly conceived independently of Taylor) on the subject and then published a book,
Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane
(1915), translated in 1924 as
The Origins of Continents and Oceans
. John Joly (1857-1933) took up Wegener's work in
The Surface History of the Earth
(1925). Conferences on continental drift were held in 1922, 1923, and 1926; at the last conference a majority decided against the theory. The chief difficulty was in devising a plausible mechanism for drift. Wegener's belief that the continents merely floated like rafts to their current positions proved to be untenable. It was only in 1961 that R. S. Dietz published a paper placing the source of drift much lower under the earth's crust than Wegener, thereby answering many geologists' objections to the theory. See Gabriel Gohau,
A History of Geology
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 187-200.

90
The “pre-human spawn of Cthulhu” are clearly the “Great Old Ones” referred to in “The Call of Cthulhu” (see n. 52). In that story it is not made clear when the spawn of Cthulhu arrived on the earth; it is merely said that “the Great Old Ones . . . lived ages before there were any men” (CC 153).

91
The Permian period is now thought to extend from 286 to 245 million years ago. A date 150 million years ago would now be regarded as part of the Upper Jurassic.

92
A reference to the fungi from Yuggoth in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (see n. 54). It is not made clear in that story when the fungi first came to earth from Yuggoth; it is only mentioned that “they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R'lyeh when it was above the waters” (CC 249). This statement itself suggests a conflict with an earlier portion of this story, since the sinking of R'lyeh is said to have occurred prior to the fungi's advent to earth (see p. 304). But HPL rarely felt obliged to adhere to data cited in earlier stories, and this is probably a willful change on his part.

93
The term Carboniferous is now generally archaic, it being replaced by two geological periods, the Mississippian (360 to 320 million years ago) and the Pennsylvanian (320 to 286 million years ago).

94
Now termed Luitpold Coast, located in Coats Land facing the Weddell Sea.

95
Charles Wilkes (1798-1877), American explorer who went to Antarctica in 1838-40 to test John Cleves Symmes's theory of the hollow earth. One of HPL's nonextant juvenile treatises was
Wilkes's Explorations
(c. 1902).

96
For Queen Mary Land, see n. 37. Kaiser Wilhelm II Land is now termed Leopold and Castrid Coast; it is to the east of Queen Mary Coast, facing the West Ice Shelf.

97
For Kadath, see n. 41 to “The Dunwich Horror.”

98
Budd Land is now termed Budd Coast, located in Wilkes Land to the west of Knox Coast. Totten Land is a region west of Budd Coast and is now termed the Sabrina Coast.

99
Constantine I (Flavius Valerius Constantinus), Emperor of Rome from 306 to 337, founded Constantinople (“the city of Constantine”; now Istanbul) in 324 on the site of the former Greek city of Byzantium, making it the eastern capital of the Roman empire. Although founded as a Christian city, it was adorned with many works of art taken from pagan temples. Constantinople later became the capital of the Byzantine empire.

100
Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink (or Borchgrevingk) (1864-1934), a Norwegian explorer, undertook an expedition to the Antarctic in 1898- 1900; in February 1899 he established the first camp on Antarctic soil, and a year later (February 19, 1900) he became the first man to walk on the Ross Ice Shelf. See his book,
First on the Antarctic Continent
(1901). HPL reports that when he was ten years old “The Borchgrevink expedition, which had just made a new record in South Polar achievement, greatly stimulated” (SL 1.37) his interest in the Antarctic. The mention of “scars on antarctic seals” derives from Karl Fricker's
The Antarctic Regions
(London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1900), a book HPL owned: “Though Borchgrevingk lately noticed scars of wounds upon some seals, which led him to believe in the existence of some mysterious, powerful beast of prey, it has been most conclusively proved that these wounds were inflicted by the teeth of a ferocious cetacean—the orca gladiator” (p. 269).

101
The ziggurats or temple towers were constructed in Babylon and other cities in Sumeria beginning in the middle of the third millenium B.C.E. One of these towers is the original of the “Tower of Babel,” as it is scornfully referred to in the Old Testament.

102
King penguins (
Aptenodytes forsteri
) are usually 37 inches tall and weigh 33 pounds. It is curious that HPL does not mention the emperor penguin (
Aptenodytes patagonica
), which is found only in Antarctica; it is usually 44 inches tall and weighs 66 pounds.