[Howard Lester, our narrator, and his friend Henry Littleway, have used some minor cranial drilling and electroding to expand their consciousness and unleash their psychic mind-over- matter powers. They progress to the next level of human evolution, where the mysteries of poltergeist activity, the true authorship of Shakespeare's plays, and a rounded understanding of Goethe fall like so many dominoes. But then a real mystery worthy of the new men-like-gods emerges].
....One morning in mid-July, a book arrived for Littleway, wrapped in an old copy of Look magazine, and I saw a photograph of the well of Chichen Itza. The article described the excavations of the previous year, when the well had finally been drained by a pump that could remove two thousand gallons a minute. But what caught my attention was the great double page colour photograph of objects removed from the mud at the bottom of the well. Among the skulls of children, beads, earthenware pots and so on, there was a small black statuette. And as I stared at it, I knew that it was related to the basalt figurine Littleway had shown me.
It may seem strange that I had not returned to this matter in several months; but this was because I was absorbed in so many other things. I had become fascinated by modern history, from 1750 onwards, observing the way in which the great evolutionary current, so easy to recognise in literature and music, becomes distorted when it tries to express itself in politics; the way in which it is driven to compromise, and even to oppose itself. Above all, there was no feeling of hurry; I could return to the problem of the basalt figure next year or the year after.
The characteristic of the basalt figure at Langton Place was a certain flatness, an air of abstraction; it might have been by Gaudier-Brzeska. The one retrieved from Chichen Itza had the same quality. I stared hard at the photograph; for a moment, it became a reality, and again I had that sense of looking down an immense cliff of time. Then I realised that my historical intuition had sharpened in three months. I had a sudden and very distinct sense of something hidden, deliberately concealed. I knew with certainty that there is something in the world's prehistory that cannot be found in any of the books on the past. And it was obscurely connected with the sense of evil at Stonehenge.
Littleway was eating his breakfast on the other side of the table. I pushed the colour photograph over to him. He said mildly 'Good heavens,' and went on eating; but he understood. After breakfast, without either of us saying a word, we went up to his room. The figurine was in a cupboard. Littleway took it out, held it across his two palms, and concentrated. He gave a slight start, and quickly put it down. I picked it up, and stared at it.
For a moment, the shape of the object seemed enriched, intensified; I was seeing it as it was when it had first been carved. And, strangely, there was no impression of primitiveness, and certainly none of the
'evil' I had sensed on Stonehenge. The thing somehow spoke of a complex and highly evolved civilisation. Now at this point, it should have been a matter of ease for me to direct my mind at the maker of the figurine. I tried to do so, and captured a sense of a more headlong and dangerous world than the one we live in; it reminded me of my feelings looking down the Victoria Falls. But at the point where the insight should have continued, it vanished. It was hard to say why it vanished. It could have been a failure of concentration on my part, a momentary distraction. But I knew there had been no distraction. I tried again, concentrating harder. This time, there could be no doubt; in some odd way, the thing was resisting my mind.
Littleway said: 'What do you make of it?' and I shrugged.
We had the same suspicion - we were so closely in sympathy with one another that there was no need even to verbalise it - but we could not be right. This was a piece of dead stone - no, not even dead, since it had never been alive. So there must be some other explanation. I felt what a reader of these notes might feel if the print suddenly began to swim under his eyes and move sideways. It must be me. So I concentrated again, and opened my mind, simply trying to apprehend what was there, to 'read' the thing, as one might try to 'read' a person's character from his handwriting. Here it was, in my hand. Someone had made it. Who? And again, just as it seemed about to answer my question, there was the odd feeling of the thing blurring, as if it was some odd optical illusion. The only thing of which I could be certain was the immense age of the thing.
Littleway and I tried for the next hour to break this 'barrier' about the figurine's origins. And when it was obvious that we were not going to succeed, we decided to attack the matter from the intellectual standpoint. Where could it have originated?
Littleway said: 'Robin Jackley's the man. I'll phone him now.' Sir Robin Jackley is, of course, one of the world's foremost authorities on ancient man; his name became famous in 1953 for his part in exposing the Piltdown forgery....
❖
....We phoned Professor Evans from Reading; he told us to come over immediately. We arrived at about half past five, after a traffic jam in Marlborough. The professor was a middle aged, chinless man, who talked in a humming drawl that reminded me of an insect. He gave us tea, and produced the jade stone from Chichen Itza,
This was a small, irregular piece, about the size of a hand, and extremely heavy. Carefully carved and scratched into its surface was a drawing of a hideous god, seated on crossed thigh bones, his mouth open, his head tilted back, a distinctly gloating expression on his face as he stares at a human head which he holds on his raised palms. I touched the stone, and instantly received an insight into its history that was as alien and powerful as some bitter incense. I was aware of hot, blinding sunlight, of a wide space cut into the jungle, and of half a dozen or so immense step pyramids. This was a land of green rain forests, alternating with deserts of limestone rubble, of swamps and bayous and tall, coarse grass. But its hot blue skies were somehow associated with terror, suffering and death. Strangely enough, the name that came into my head was Tezcatlipoca, whom I discovered later to be an Aztec god, 'Lord of the Smoking Mirror' and god of the curved obsidian knife. Under the Spaniards, he degenerated into a bogey man who walked the roads and killed and dismembered travellers - a kind of Aztec Jack the Ripper. (The Aztecs, of course, came much later than the Maya; they bear roughly the same relation to the Maya that the Romans bear to the ancient Greeks.) It was this god of the knife who seemed to me somehow the symbol of the Maya religion.
The block of jade stone was not old, by the standards of the basalt figurine - it had been carved roughly five hundred years B.C. And holding it in my hand, sensing all its history - and the history of the Mayas over three thousand years - I experienced a feeling of disgust, of rejection, very similar to my feeling about the Elizabethan era, Sentimentalists dream about the simplicity of the past, but the truth of the past is a truth of stupidity and coarseness, brutality and inconvenience, and of human beings stuck in the present like flies on fly-paper.
I was also clearly aware of the green waters of the Cenote of Chichen Itza; but, strangely enough, there was no horror associated with this. Those who were sacrificed were frightened, but not terrified; they went as messengers from their people to the gods below. They were thrown in at dawn; those who could tread water long enough were pulled out at midday. They told stories of conversing with the gods, and of seeing great multitudes of people in the water below them. So the well evoked no horror; only wonder and fear. Later, I read the book by Edward Thompson describing his exploration of the well; it confirmed what I had grasped while holding the stone. He believed that the 'voices' of the gods were echoes of voices from above, and that the crowds of people were reflections of the faces looking down the well.
The professor offered us tea, and talked about the Yucatan peninsula. He had spent six months there with the Franklin expedition. He was inclined to be dismissive about the mystery of the basalt figurine.
'The Mayas were a great people. They might well have penetrated as far as Argentina. They built their cities in the midst of the jungle when they might just as easily have chosen more convenient places. They thrived on adversity during their great period. They preferred the jungle earth because it was more fertile.
People like that are capable of anything...'
Littleway, eating a slice of fruit cake, asked: 'Are you sure that explains why they chose the jungle?' I knew what he meant. Professor Evans's theory was a good theory; but we could see the truth about the Mayas. It was not some Nietzschean 'fascination for what's difficult' that made them prefer the jungle. It was the primitiveness of their agriculture and the rigidity of their caste system that left them no alternative.
Evans said: 'Of course, I'm not sure of anything. No one really knows anything about this people. Why did they abandon their cities around 610 A.D. and migrate to the north? We know they weren't driven out by enemies. We know it wasn't some epidemic like the Black Death. We know it wasn't earthquake or floods. So what was it? It's as strange as if all the people of southern England abandoned their homes and migrated to Scotland.'
Littleway was casually examining the stone as he listened: I knew that he was staring into the past and seeing the answer to the mysteries. It suddenly struck me that it should not be necessary to actually hold the stone to receive its vibrations. I was only about six feet away from Littleway. I stared at the stone in his hand, and made my mind empty, opening it to the past. For a few moments, nothing happened; then, as I kept my mind passive, the impressions began to form. And, to my surprise, they were much clearer than when I held the stone in my hand; altogether sharper and flatter. Actually holding the stone, I experienced intuitions and feelings, like walking into a large kitchen where many things are cooking at the same time. Now all these 'smells' had vanished. I was simply seeing, with a cold clarity, like looking down the long end of a telescope.
What I saw was too complicated to explain briefly to Evans - or to explain at length here. Littleway was right. The Mayas achieved their impressive civilisation through rigid discipline and caste structure. It was the opposite of a democracy; the nobles remained nobles; the farmers remained farmers; the shopkeepers remained shopkeepers. The nobles and the priests were completely supported by farmers and workers, so they became lazy and decadent. But the workers never rose to become nobles, no matter how talented. It was a civilisation designed to crush genius in the people and encourage decadence in the nobles and priesthood. So it had no power of adaptation. They stayed in their cities until the land that fed them was exhausted; then there was no alternative to a mass migration.
This was not the whole explanation. There was something more sinister here. Why was the social structure so rigid? Why was the priesthood so dominant? Behind Maya civilisation lay the conception of the Great Secret, a mystery symbolised by the enormous heads of serpents in their temples. The priests held a secret that was so terrifying that the world might be destroyed if it was ever revealed. It was the priests who had ordered the mass migration. And they believed they were under orders from Someone Else, some appalling ambassador of the Great Secret.
❖
....It had been a great many years now since I had taken an active interest in the archaeology of Britain - so much so that I had completely failed to notice Silbury Hill when we had passed it on our way to Calne. I reached for the gazetteer that we kept in the glove compartment, and read: 'Silbury Hill, large barrow,' Wilts, in the valley of the Kennet, seven miles west of Marlborough. Is 1,680 feet in circuit at the base, 315 at top, and 135 feet high.
Rising from the landscape like a huge inverted boiled pudding, Silbury Hill has all the appearances of a burial mound. Traditionally it is the grave of King Sil or Zel, who was buried on horseback; Stukely declares that King Sil's grave was dug up in 1723, but there is no evidence to support this statement. A shaft sunk from the top in 1777, and a tunnel dug from the side in 1849, failed to reveal the purpose of the mound. It was once surrounded by sarsens similar to those at Stonehenge.'
It was not until I read the word Stonehenge that I had an intuition that this was something important.
Littleway had parked the car beside the road; we found a gate, and walked I across the field to the great mound. I had forgotten to mention to Littleway my discovery that I could 'intuit' things from a distance. I now tried this with the mound ahead of me. The result was elusive, like a blurred picture seen through a pair of unfocused binoculars. I tried harder, and realised that I was sweating from the effort. At this moment, my eye fell upon a small boulder, almost buried in the turf - obviously one of the sarsens mentioned in the gazetteer. It was like an electric shock. Again, I experienced the current of menace that I had felt at Stonehenge. I walked over to the stone and stared down at it. The vibration was unmistakable. I looked up again towards the mound. This time, I received no impression at all. It was as if a thick fog had descended. I could see the mound clearly enough; but it was somehow 'innocent'; it told me nothing.
Littleway was looking at his watch.
'If we want to get to the club in time for dinner, we hadn't better waste much time.'
Obviously, he felt nothing whatever. I could virtually read his mind by now.
'Let's walk to the top of the mound first.'
We followed the small path to the top. Everything looked harmless and normal: cars passing on the Bath road, a tractor cutting hay in the next field. But my powers of 'insight' seemed to have dwindled to a minimum, as if I was too tired to make any effort.
Standing on top of the mound, I looked around - at Avebury to the north, the Long Barrow a mile to the south, the pleasant hazy warmth of an English June on the horizon. And I experienced suddenly the desire to relax, to sit in a cool comer in a small pub and drink a long, cool pint of beer. The grass looked golden in the sunlight; England and its history seemed all pleasant and green and secure.
At the same time, I felt a flickering of suspicion about this relaxation. Two years ago, it would have struck me as wholly pleasant, one of those 'breathing spaces' that seem a gift of the gods. But in the meantime, I had learned to induce value experiences at will, and to understand the inner-pressures that cause them.
There was something wrong with this one, a whiff of the confidence trick. And I was vaguely disturbed by the fading of my insight, my sense of being merely 'here, now'. As we walked back down the mound, I made a sudden effort to throw off this fatigue of the will, to grasp what lay in the earth under my feet.
And for a moment, I was successful. And what I glimpsed made me cold, as if I had fallen into icy water. There was something down there, down deep under my feet. For a second it was obvious; that was why excavations had never uncovered the purpose of Silbury Hill. It was far deeper than any archaeologist would dream of digging.
And then, immediately, the insight vanished. It was as if my will was pinioned, in the grip of a powerful wrestler who prevented me from moving my arms or legs. The odd thing is that it felt somehow impersonal, as if I had simply stepped into a magnetic field that held me trapped. And in fact, as we walked across the field to the road, the pressure relaxed; once again my mind could turn to the past, become aware of myself standing at a certain point in the vast galleries of history.
Littleway had obviously noticed nothing at all. I said to him: 'How do you feel?'
'Fine. Thirsty though. How about stopping at that pub outside Marlborough for a quick pint?'
I have mentioned that we had almost stopped drinking alcohol, because it no longer seemed worth while; it dulled the mind and body. But we both drank occasionally, especially in old country pubs. So there was nothing unusual in Littleway's suggestion. Still, we had both drunk a large quantity of tea less than an hour before. I recalled my own desire for a drink on top of the mound. As we got into the car, I said:
'Well, what do you think of the mystery now?'
Littleway glanced back at the hill with mild speculation.
'As matter of fact, I didn't really bother. Did you?'
' Why didn't you bother, since that's why we stopped here?'
'I don't know - laziness, I suppose. And all this stuff about the Mayas.' He started the car. 'Why do you ask?'
'Because I'm pretty certain there's something up there that doesn't intend us to be curious.'
He was suddenly alert.
'What makes you think so?'
I described my sensations from the moment I had seen the sarsen. He said slowly:
'You could be right. But I noticed nothing...'
'Why did you say we had to get back to the club? We'll be back before nine in any case.'
'I... don't know. Tiredness, I suppose.'
We drove in silence for ten minutes. Then he said:
'Do you think it's anything active? Or is it just some odd limitation of our minds?'
I tried to focus the question, but it evaded me.
'I don't know. It could be either. But look at the facts. This basalt statue. Neither of us think Jackley's right about it being only five thousand years old. And suppose the statue from Chichen Itza is of the same period? How did it get there?
What's the connection between Mesopotamia at the time of Sumer and Yucatan three thousand years later?'
'Perhaps there's none at all. One piece of primitive art looks very like another.'
'Alright. But supposing this thing is half a million years old. Do you realise what human beings were like as long ago as that?'
'I think so. It's about the date of Heidelberg man.'
'Quite. And if you've ever seen the skull of Heidelberg man, you'll see my point. He may have been the first true man, but by our standards, he was still an ape. Can you imagine an ape carving that thing?'
'If he didn't, who did?'
I sat there, groping my way into the problem, trying to fit together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, wondering whether I wasn't making some simple and obvious mistake out of inexperience. But then, there have always been certain facts that archaeologists have failed to fit into their schemes. Sabre tooth tigers were extinct long before man became an artist. How, then, do we account for cave drawings of the sabre tooth tiger? Racial memory? The age of great reptiles ended seventy million years ago. Man may be two million years old. What about legends of, dragons, that look so much like the tyrannosaurus and stegosaurus?
I also found myself reflecting on my vision of giants building Stonehenge. The sarsen stone at Silbury had produced in me feelings that closely resembled those I experienced at Stonehenge. Avebury is less than a mile to the north of Silbury Hill, and is generally reckoned to be the oldest neolithic monument in Britain.
Some historians believe that the centre of neolithic religion moved from Avebury to Stonehenge for unknown reasons. Was Avebury also built by giants? I began to wish that we had looked at Avebury as well as the Silbury mound.
I spoke about these speculations to Littleway. He interrupted me with: 'Incidentally, did you ever read Hoerbiger?' I said I hadn't. 'It's a long time since I read him, but if I remember rightly, he believed there were once giants on the earth - or rather, that human beings were once giants. He believed the earth has had several moons, and that they all came closer and closer until they crashed. And of course, as the moon approaches the earth, the earth's gravitational pull is diminished. So people grew bigger. I was rather impressed by the theory when I was a kid.'
'Have you any books on it?'
'No, but I think Roger has.'
Later that evening, as we were eating dinner in the club, he said:
'I've just remembered one of the things that impressed me about the Hoerbiger theory. He points out that Darwinian evolution can't account for certain facts about certain insects. There's an insect that strikes at the nerve centre of a caterpillar to paralyse it, so the caterpillar can provide food for the insect eggs as they hatch out. I seem to remember that Fabre pointed out to Darwin that there couldn't be any trial and error here. If the insect doesn't succeed at his first attempt, then its children die and the species comes to an end.'
'What has that to do with the giant theory?'
'Not much. He brings it up as evidence that the earth hasn't always had seasons. I think Hoerbiger believes that the sun was once much hotter, and that the earth's axis was upright instead of tilted, so that it was summer all the year round. In that case, the insects probably lived much longer, and they had time to learn about paralysing caterpillars and so on. So when the axis finally tilted, certain of them had turned the trick into an instinct, so they could do it every time.'
'That's assuming the babies had to be fed on live caterpillars. But there could have been alternatives before they learnt that trick.'
'Oh, I'm not seriously defending the idea. It's just a thought.'
I lay in bed thinking about it that night....
❖
....I reminded Littleway of the Hoerbiger book he had mentioned and he went next door to look for it. He returned an hour later, carrying half a dozen big volumes.
'I've been talking to Roger. He tells me there's a writer of weird stories called Lovecraft who has legends about the earth being inhabited by some 'elder race' that still possesses some powers. That might be worth looking into. I've also found some volumes by Gabriel Guénon. He's a French follower of Hoerbiger. I seem to remember he has some similar legend.'
We both settled down to searching through the books. After half an hour, Littleway found the key passage in a book by Guénon, deceptively entitled The Ages of the Earth, published by the Planetary Society in Paris, 1928. It ran:
'The scientist is inclined to scoff at superstition. But it would be more truly scientific to ask how a superstition arose. Scientists dismiss the story of the Curse of Tutankhamen, explaining that the deaths of twenty or so people associated with the expedition were all "from natural causes". They do not comment on the statistical improbability of so many deaths within five years of the opening of the tomb.
'According to Steinach, the German warlock, certain men in the ancient past possessed the power to awaken the Great Old Ones, who have been sleeping for seven million years. The Great Old Ones are without bodies of their own; they are glad to use human beings as servants; in exchange, they will grant certain favours. They possess, for example, the power to change a man into a serpent or a wolf. The Great Old Ones also control the power to curse material objects, so that they become infected with a kind of psychic poison that can destroy anyone who disturbs the object. This, in Steinach's view, explains the nature of the curse of the Pharoahs.'
Guénon's 'Great Old Ones' certainly accorded with our own theory about the 'forces' that were obstructing us. Then what if he were right about the 'curse'? Could it be that these forces were not still alive, but had simply covered their traces with 'psychic poison'?
I must admit that neither of us was inclined to place much reliance on Guénon. Even in the passage I have quoted above, his tendency to indulge in non-sequiturs can be seen. On the other hand, he had obviously read just about every book on magic and occultism that had ever been published, so he was a valuable guide.
Guénon had died in 1941 in German-occupied Paris. His last book, The Secrets of Atlantis, published posthumously, has a great deal about Lovecraft, the American writer of horror stories (who had died four years earlier). According to Lovecraft, the Ancient Old Ones had come from the stars, and once dominated the earth, building immense cities of gigantic stone blocks. They had destroyed themselves through the practice of black magic, and were now 'sleeping' under the earth. Lovecraft, in turn, seems to have derived some of his ideas from the Welsh writer Arthur Machen, who also has stories of strange people who live under the earth, the remains of an 'elder race', and who are capable of turning themselves into reptiles and of causing objects to fly through the air. Guénon does not explain how the Great Old Ones could have destroyed themselves through black magic, if 'magic' is simply another name for what happens when human beings invoke them....
❖
....A further comment by Guénon intrigued us: 'Biologists and anthropologists hold the view that civilised men evolved slowly from his primitive ancestors... But occult traditions are singularly in accord in stating that the first men reached a remarkable degree of civilisation in a relatively brief period, and that it was after this that a series of catastrophes caused a regression to earlier stages. Earthquakes, floods, the complete destruction of whole continents. And he goes on to explain his view of 'moon catastrophes', each one of which caused a degeneration to a more primitive condition. It had to be admitted that Gunon had a certain genius for collecting odd facts about primitive tribes and correlating them to support his theory. For example, he speaks of a dying tribe called the Urus on the shores of Lake Titicaca and the River Desaguero in Peru, and says: 'The Urus and the Aymaras (a neighbouring tribe) support the view that the Urus are not human. They are the degenerate descendants of gods who once ruled on the shores of the great lake.' Lyell had been intrigued by the Urus, and we had once paid a visit to their reservation on the shore of Titicaca - which is, of course, the highest fresh water lake in the world, and the largest in South America. And in Callao, we had stayed in the house of a Peruvian geologist, Herando Capac, who spoke to us about the strange line of maritime deposits that runs for nearly four hundred miles up mountains between Lake Coipasa and Lake Umayo, indicating that the sea may once have formed a kind of belt around the centre of the earth. Lyell, I remember, argued that this was due to the displacement of geological strata, and neither convinced the other. Guenon mentions the same maritime deposits, and argues that the moon was once close enough to the earth to gather all the seas in a bulge around the equator, until it came too close and exploded, causing the seas to rush back, destroying the great civilisations that existed on what is now the bottom of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
❖
....What impressed me most about the Kabbalah - to which I also devoted much study - was its insistence that the universe was not created by God, but by a number of demiurges or powers. A. E. Waite declares that this is because the Jewish mystics believed that God must be remote, boundless, completely beyond our material universe. This struck me as a reasonable explanation until I began to actually study the Kabbalah. Then I immediately sensed another reason behind the legends of demiurges - some remote ancestral memory of immense, god-like powers operating on the earth. The tenth century Karaite historian Joseph ben Jacob al-Kirkisani has an interesting passage about the eighth-century Persian sect,
'Men of the Caves': 'For their secret tradition has it that the demiurges who created the universe subsequently came to dwell on the earth and under the sea. They possessed the power to cause mountains to rise up by means of the moon [my italics] or to cause the sea to swallow up fertile places.
These demiurges were destroyed in one of their own calamities, although Philo's history declares they are only asleep.' The action of the moon in creating the tides has, of course, always been known. Hoerbiger asserts that mountain ranges have been created - in Abyssinia, for example - by the action of the moon, which remained stationary over Abyssinia when it was revolving at the same speed as the earth's rotation. But the Persians of the eighth century can have known nothing of the theory that the inside of the earth is made of molten rock.
My vitality and sense of purpose remained at a high level. And yet I was aware that my powers of time-vision had diminished. I was still capable of exercising them if I made an effort; but spontaneous insights - like my recognition that the cottage at Bidford on Avon was connected with Bacon - had ceased. There was no actual sense of oppression; on the contrary, there was an unusual sense of happiness and wellbeing. But it was no longer possible to settle down to long periods of uninterrupted work. Minor distractions arose with unbelievably frequency....
❖
....Before the day was over, I had made one discovery that none of the Maya experts had stumbled upon, unimportant in itself, but very indicative. This early Maya religion of 'dark gods' was paradoxically associated with humour. There is a fine Mixtec turquoise mask in the British Museum, a kind of mosaic skull with a few very white teeth. As one stares at it, one becomes suddenly aware that it conveys a ferocious humour, and that this has nothing to do with the traditional 'grin' of the skull. This humour is terrifying and supernatural, the humour of pitiless gods who find man's suffering amusing. And yet somehow, it can be accepted by men themselves, who acknowledge their mortality and misery.
When I made this discovery, I knew that I was getting closer to the secrets of the Mayas. For it was now clear to me that the Vatican Codex is a kind of Maya Pentateuch, their account of creation and the early history of the tribe. And since, in many respects, their mythology resembles that of their neighbours, the Quich6 Indians (whose 'Old Testament", the Topol Vuh, was committed to paper by some anonymous Quiche scholar in the sixteenth century), I found myself in possession of many clues to the meaning of the
'unknown two thirds' of the Maya symbols.
I must admit that what baffled me was why the 'interference' had ceased - or at least, ceased to be persistent and noticeable. My 'time vision' was still relatively feeble if I tried to apply it to the distant past, although it still seemed clear enough when applied to less remote epochs. As to the basalt figurine, its history no longer seemed completely opaque. When I stared at it now, I could sense that it was connected with some strange religion of appalling humour. There was something oddly refreshing about this insight. Man tends to make his gods in his own image, to humanise them. But these gods were savage and totally alien....
❖
….The more I thought of it, the more obvious it seemed. Primitive man was a hunter and trapper; he was as much at home in the dark as in the daylight; so why the fear of the dark? It has always seemed natural enough to explain man's superstitions in terms of ignorance? But does ignorance really explain it?
It may seem that these speculations were not really so revolutionary, since we already knew - or suspected - that remote ages of the earth had been dominated by the powers we called 'them'. But indeed, it had never struck me that they might be in some sense the source of all human history.
And when I followed up this line of thought, the consequences were frightening. For example, my speculation that man might be a kind of 'retarded ape' took on new meaning. Littleway had said: 'If the development of an ape's embryo could be arrested, it would produce something like a man'. Which immediately raises the question: Who arrested it?
Expressed in this way, my train of thought sounds arbitrary; but it must be remembered that I was guided by intuitions about 'them'. The total darkness of the pre-human epoch was turning into a thick twilight.
Nothing very exciting happened during the next four days. I plodded on, using Garsia's textbook of the Mayathan language, and every available source on Maya symbology. But there was a satisfying sense of achievement, of moving forward a fraction of an inch at a time. In the evenings, Littleway and I discussed our findings. He was still immersed in his study of ancient man, and much impressed by the theory put forward by Ivar Lissner that the very earliest man possessed a high degree of intelligence and was monotheistic, and that man degenerated through the practice of magic.
After the fifth day of studying the Vatican Codex, light began to break. I was now able to translate whole sentences at a time, and to guess the meanings of unknown symbols. The opening sentences run:
'Izamna ruled the sky, but because he was stretched throughout all space, was unable to see his own body. Therefore he filled the sky with blood in the form of a raincloud. [The Mayan word for raincloud is the same as the word for steam, so this passage could be translated "blood in the form of a gas".] Then the drops of rain condensed, and became the stars. Then Ahau, the sun, was appointed king of the stars.
He gathered the fragments of cloud that were left, and moulded the earth. But before he was done, his wife Alaghom Naum, called to him, and he left the work half finished. Now the spirits who inhabited the cloud [the earth] had no bodies, and they lived in this state for many ages [the text gives the precise length of the period], until the cloud became the earth, and then - bodies were of earth.'
The first remarkable thing about this passage is their apparent knowledge that the sun is a star. Ancient astronomers believed the sun to be a unique body at the centre of the universe, quite unlike anything else.
Next, there is the statement that the 'spirits' who inhabited the cloud of blood were 'bodiless'. Most primitive people believe that stones, trees and so on, possess 'spirits'. Before the earth had solidified (again, a remarkable idea for an ancient Maya), these spirits had not stones or trees to inhabit. But when the earth finally solidified, they were trapped inside it, still bodiless.
The Vatican Codex goes on to describe the creation of mountains, groves of cypresses and pines, and how the Mother Goddess separated the waters into rivulets with a comb. In many respects, the text here resembles that of the Popol Vuh, which is probably based on it.
Then, following the symbol of the dark god on the fifth sheet, there is a curious episode, Ghatanothoa, the dark god, also known as Father Yig, descends to earth from the stars, and attempts to rape the dawn goddess, who is bathing in the sea. She manages to escape, and his sperm rushes out over the earth, creating all living things. To judge by the Dresden Codex, the star from which Yig descends is to be identified with Arcturus. The 'lords of the earth' rise up in fury, and imprison Yig under the earth; his attempts to escape produce great cataclysms. Meanwhile, the seas are full of the tiny creatures from Yig's sperm. (Again, this is either imaginative guesswork, or the sign of a highly developed science, capable of examining sperm under a microscope.) Soon, these creatures emerge on to the land, and become reptiles and animals. They are too many to be controlled by the Ancient Old Ones. And at this point, the Ancient Old Ones create man to be their servant. The account is quite unambiguous: 'They caused the earth to open, so the monkeys were imprisoned below the mountain of Kukulcan. They kept them there for a period of a katun [twenty years], and when they came out, they had lost their hairs, and their skin was white from the darkness.' Men now became the servants of the Ancient Old Ones, hunting animals, catching fishes, building temples. The world endured for a period of 1716 tun (or years), when the imprisoned Yig destroyed it by drawing a passing star down on to the earth, causing floods and lightning. The account that then follows - of the subsequent four periods in the history of the earth - is close to the account given by Montaigne, which I have already quoted.
This is the substance of the Vatican Codex, which I translated into English....
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....my consciousness of the world seemed larger, more complex. It was the mystic's sensation of oneness, of everything blending into everything else. Everything I looked at reminded me of something else, which also became present to my consciousness, as if I were simultaneously seeing a million worlds and smelling a million scents and hearing a million sounds - not mixed up, but each separate and clear. I was overwhelmed with a sense of my smallness in the face of this vast, beautiful, objective universe, this universe whose chief miracle is that it exists as well as myself. It is no dream, but a great garden in which life is trying to obtain a foothold. I experienced a desire to burst into tears of gratitude; then I controlled it, and the feeling subsided into a calm sense of immense, infinite beauty.
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....Enjoyment of music is intentional; that is to say, you can cultivate a love of music, learn to enjoy things you didn't enjoy before, and so on. But there is also some strange element in music, something in the shape of a melody or the sounds of a harmony - that is already there, quite apart from what we put into it. (This is why Schoenberg's twelve tone system contains a hidden fallacy that invalidates the whole idea.)
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.... It was suddenly clear that all human beings can enter into a close, deep communion if they will make the effort to break through the normal barriers of pettiness and self-absorption. This was an interesting idea that had never really struck me before - the idea that the whole human race might eventually enter into such deep sympathy that everyone will care as much for other people's welfare as his own, so that everyone treats every other member of the human race as a mother treats her baby: with a deep, open sympathy. The idea seemed to me so beautiful that I felt close to tears. It was so clear that this would solve every problem: that there is enough of everything to go round; that all misery could be eliminated; that the problem of the population explosion would cease to be insoluble when everyone felt this deep mutual understanding. All the human race needs to move to an entirely new stage of its evolution is this vital recognition that, spiritually speaking, it is a single organism. It came to me that Jesus had been a visionary of the most incredible order: that he had seen something that will one day seem self-evident.
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....It was one of those clear, cool afternoons in late November, with that grey, autumnal smell in the air. I parked the car in the courtyard of the British Museum, and walked down to Piccadilly, then to St James's Square. It was strange how completely my feelings about London had changed since the last time I had been here. At the time I had seen it as an enormous zoo; now I realised this was because I had been too involved. Now I felt soaked in its atmosphere and its history. It seemed tragic that so many great writers had lived and worked in this city, and all had lived 'too close' to it. 'Close-upness deprives us of meaning.' Yet they had lived and worked bravely, and died in the usual frustration and exhaustion: Blake, Carlyle, Ruskin, Wells, Shaw, all visionaries. And I was getting the reward they should have had: able to hold the world at arm's length, to see its meaning, to grasp something of the complex pattern.
Whitehead said 'Life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment', and human beings have developed the mind, the imagination, to this end. And all these people around me should be capable of this contemplative detachment that made life seem so wholly good to me.
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....As we stood on the steps of the Museum, I said: 'By the way, have you ever come across any other creation myths that involve strange forces that inhabit the earth?'
[Carolyi] thought for a moment, then shook his head. 'Not in the sense of your Maya scripture. There are plenty of myths of monsters. And the Wahungwe Makoni tribe in what was Southern Rhodesia has a myth of a dark god from the stars. But nothing like your Ancient Old Ones.'
As I was reversing the car, he came up and leaned in at the window. He was smiling.
'I have just thought of an absurd parallel to your Maya legend. Have you ever heard of the Evangelista case?'
'No.'
'It was a murder case in Detroit in the late twenties. I won't go into the details..' (his eyes gestured towards the children) 'but the victim was the leader of a religious cult. He wrote an enormous bible about the ancient history of the world, and I seem to remember strange beings like your Ancient Old Ones. I may be able to send you an account of the case if you're interested.'
I said: 'Thank you. I'd be very interested indeed.' - I was being polite.
The drive back was uneventful; we drove across country instead of up the M.1, arriving back at mid-afternoon. I had phoned Littleway before we left London; he was obviously pleased at the idea of having a woman around the house. The children took to him immediately. It was clear that our arrangement was going to be a success.
I told Littleway about Carolyi, although I forgot to mention the murder case. It struck me that we might risk taking Carolyi into our confidence and persuading him to undergo the operation; he struck me as the kind of person we needed as an ally.
After supper, when Barbara had gone to bed, he said:
'Charming girl. Are you thinking of marrying her?'
'I think so. It's time I got married.'
'Oh, quite so. But don't you think it could be dangerous?'
'In what way?' I knew what he meant, but wanted to hear him say it.
'I've been wondering if all this couldn't be a trap? I was looking at Roger in hospital this afternoon. That poor devil's been through hell - I don't think he'll ever be really sane again. I can't believe that these things can be all that benevolent.'
'I know. I thought of that.'
'I had an unpleasant experience while you were away. I decided to have another go at reading the basalt statue.' (We used the word 'reading' for the attempt to exercise time-vision on objects.) 'I made quite an effort - kept at it for the best part of an hour. Then I suddenly got the feeling that the damned things were somehow around this place - looking in the windows. It really felt unpleasant. In fact, Clareta felt it too.
She insisted on sleeping in the spare bedroom in this part of the house.'
'Did you get the feeling they could have done any harm?'
'I don't know. It's hard to say. It was just a prickly, nasty feeling - as if you knew a man-eating tiger was watching you through the window.'
'Not in the house itself, then?'
'No, not in the house.'
The next morning, a book parcel arrived from London. It contained two books: an American paperback called Murder by Persons Unknown, and a battered, blue volume without lettering on the spine, whose title page read: The Oldest History of the World, Discovered by Occult Science in Detroit, Mich.
The story of the Evangelista murder case was contained in the paperback. On the morning of 3 July 1929, a man went into a house in St Aubin Avenue, Detroit, and found the owner, Benjamino Evangelista, decapitated in his office. The police discovered that Evangelista's wife and four daughters - whose ages ranged between eighteen months and eight years - had also been murdered, and there had been an attempt to amputate the arm of Evangelista's wife and one of the children. The police came to believe that the murder weapon was a machete. It was subsequently discovered that Evangelista was the leader of a religious cult, and claimed to possess supernatural powers. He also claimed that he received supernatural revelation every morning, between midnight and 3 a.m. and that this had enabled him to write his 'Oldest History of the World' in three volumes, between 1906 and 1926.
No clue to the murders was ever found; none of Evangelista's followers were ever located. A man called Tecchio, whom the police suspected, died five years later, when a certain amount of evidence against him had accumulated. The case is still unsolved.
I turned to the Oldest History. It was written in a curious, foreign English. 'By the Willingness of God, my respect to this Nation, I shall do my best to tell you about the world before God was created up to this last generation.' The book was full of allusions to a 'prophet Meil', who may have been Evangelista himself, in some previous incarnation. Meil travelled over the world, with two assistants, aiding the righteous and bringing the evil to justice. The book was full of violence and fantastic events. At a casual glance, it seemed a typical piece of ordinary crank literature, badly written and frequently misspelled.
And then a passage on page eleven arrested my attention: 'In the Necremicon it is told how the Dark Ones came to the earth from the stars, and created men to be their servants.' I caught my breath, as if I had suddenly plunged into cold water. This had been written around 1906, long before Lovecraft 'invented' the Necronomicon 'by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred'; even in 1926, when the Oldest History was finished, Lovecraft was still an apprentice writer.
There could be no doubt that 'Necremicon' was a misprint or mis-spelling of Necronomicon, for it occurs again on page twenty-eight as 'Necronemicon'. And again, on page 214, it describes how the Prophet Meil brings about the destruction of Prince Trampol because he is 'a dabbler in the magical mysteries of the Necromicon'.
Suddenly, without possibility of doubt, I knew one thing. Evangelista had been destroyed by 'them' - that is, by someone deliberately driven half-mad by 'them', and imbued with an insane grudge against the whole Evangelista family.
I showed Littleway the book. And he immediately asked the question that had already occurred to me. If the Oldest History contained matters that 'they' wanted kept secret, why had they allowed the book to fall into our hands? It would have been easy enough to influence Carolyi's mind against me and make him decide not to post it.
And then, as I read through the Oldest History, I thought I understood the reason. The book was an incredible farrago of nonsense. Parts of it may have been 'inspired', but for the most part, it was the attempt of a semi-literate - with a touch of the rogue about him - to imitate the Bible; I could also discern the influence of the Book of Mormon. Apart from the sentence about the Dark Ones creating men, there was nothing very profound or interesting about the Oldest History. And yet certain things emerged quite clearly. For some reason, Evangelista had developed some strange faculty of visionary second-sight.
There was probably some truth in his assertion that he received his revelations between midnight and 3 a.m. every day. He had no power to distinguish between the turbid fantasies of his own subconscious mind and genuine moments of 'time vision'. But his endless attempts to peer into distant epochs of time, combined perhaps with some brain abnormality (second sight is often associated with head injuries), had given him glimpses into the pre-Pleistocene period of the Ancient Old Ones (I have said that it is easier to see remote epochs than more recent ones.) He may have started as a slightly unbalanced charlatan; but his awareness that many of his 'visions' were genuine glimpses of the past - for they bear a stamp of reality that makes them unmistakable - may well have convinced him that he was a reincarnation of the Prophet Meil, destined, like Joseph Smith, to found a great religion. And if all three volumes of his Oldest History had appeared, he might well have succeeded. At the time he was murdered, he had converted the basement of his house into a kind of chapel, draped with green cloth, with 'bestial, malformed figures' made of papier ma'che' suspended from wires above the altar, and a great eye, made to glow with an electric bulb, as a centre-piece. (Was this a symbol of the Ancient Old Ones, of whose constant surveillance he was aware?) The second two volumes of his work were still in manuscript at the time of his death. Were there more revelations of the 'Ancient Old Ones' in them? It seems likely, for the faculty of time-vision grows with practice.
And suddenly it was clear why 'they' had allowed the Oldest History to reach me. It was a warning. I now had a 'family'. And Littleway's brother had already attempted one murder. The inference was clear.
It could be war or peace, as I chose.
I must admit that it would have taken a great deal to make me endanger my 'family'. Shaw asks: 'Is there a father's heart as well as a mother's?' and to me, the answer is self-evidently yes. That Bridget and Matthew were not my own children made no difference. They kept me in a perpetual state of amusement. It was obvious that they needed a father's attention. Matthew approached me after they had been in the house for two days and asked me: 'Are you going to marry Mummy?'
I said: 'I expect so.'
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....how do we find out whether there's some kind of occult collection in Philadelphia? It might be a private collector. Or it might belong to some crank group. I seem to recall that Evangelista was in Philadelphia at one time...'
I said: 'I know Edgar Freeman, the head of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania.
He's lived there most of his life, I think.'
'Ring him. What's the time now - half past one. That's eight thirty in Pennsylvania. Give him until ten o'clock.'
It seemed a very long shot, but we were determined to explore every possibility, no matter how remote. I placed a call with the transatlantic telephone operator, and said I wanted a call to the University of Pennsylvania at ten o'clock. The call came through a few minutes after ten. Luckily, Freeman was in his office. When I'd identified myself and exchanged greetings, I said:
'I've got rather an odd problem. I'm trying to locate a book - a mediaeval book on magic and the supernatural. Are there any libraries in Philadelphia that specialise in such things?'
'Not as far as I know. I could make enquiries for you. I believe the Rosicrucians have a branch here, but I don't think they have much of a library. We have a pretty good section here at the university, of course.
Any idea of the book's title?'
I explained that it was sometimes known as the Necronimicon, but that I couldn't say definitely. He pointed out that the Necronomicon was a fictional work invented by Lovecraft, and I explained that I had reason to believe it really existed - or was based on a real book. He said:
'Gosh, I just don't know what to say. I have to admit I don have the first idea... I suppose it's in Latin?'
'Not necessarily. It could be in Arabic.'
'Well that shouldn't be too hard to check. I could find out whether we've got any volumes in Arabic on magic. Frankly, I doubt it. Would you like me to check the Library of Congress catalogue?'
'No. I think it's in Philadelphia somewhere.'
'Well, alright. I'll go down to the library right now. Can I call you back?'
'Let me call you back. In say an hour.'
The possibility seemed absurdly remote. It was only my determination to follow every possible lead that made me pursue it.
An hour later, the operator rang me with my call. Freeman was in the library. He read me out a list of books on which Lovecraft might have based the idea of the Necronomicon Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, Alkiridi, Costa Ber Luca, Albumasar, Khalid Ibn Jazid, Rasis, and the anonymou author of the article on Hermetics in the Kitab-Fihrist, the tenth-century Arab encyclopedia. The opinion of the librarian was that Lovecraft may have based his 'mad Arab, Abdu; Alhazred' on Morienus, a legendary sorcerer who wrote a number of books on magic - all of which have vanished. The only Arabic book on magic in the library was John of Spain's twelfth-century translation of Costa ben Luca's Difference of Soul and Spirit into Latin.
I spoke to the librarian, who was an admirer of Lovecraft, and had taken some trouble to look up every possible source for the Necronomicon. I didn't like to mention Evangelista's Oldest History in case he thought me a total crank. We talked for twenty minutes, and covered every possibility. Then he said:
'There's also, of course, the Voynich manuscript, although we know very little about it, of course...'
'What's that?'
'Don't you know about it? It's been arousing some interest recently. Professor Lang became very interested, but of course, he disappeared...'
'He what?'
'He was involved in a plane crash, I believe. His nephew works in the English department here.'
'Could you give me details?'
'Wouldn't it be better if I wrote to you? You must be running up an enormous phone bill.'
'It's all chargeable against tax.'
Goodwin's - the librarian's - story was, briefly, that Professor Lang of the University of Virginia had become interested in the Voynich manuscript seven years before. He had had it photographed in colour and enlarged, and subsequently told a few close friends that he had succeeded in translating it. But he had disappeared on a plane trip to Washington in 1968 - the plane, a private one, was never found.
I asked: 'But what is this Voynich manuscript?'
This story was longer and more complicated. The manuscript had been found in an Italian castle and brought to America in 1912 by a rare book dealer named Voynich. It was believed to be the work of Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century alchemist. But it seemed to be written in code, or in some strange symbols. A Professor Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania had devoted several years to breaking the code, and announced at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in 1921 that the manuscript proved that Bacon was about five centuries ahead of his time as a scientist and philosopher. Newbold died in 1928, and his translation of the cipher was published. Another cipher expert, Professor Manly of Chicago, now examined it thoroughly, and realised that Newbold had deceived himself. The cipher Was
'uncrackable', simply because too much ink had peeled off the vellum for the symbols to be read.
Newbold's 'translation' was wishful thinking. And that, in effect, ended the story of 'the most mysterious manuscript in the world', until Lang's attempt at translation in 1966.
As Goodwin told me this story, I felt the stirrings of an immense excitement. Even without the significant touch of Lang's disappearance, I would have felt this inner-certainty that I had found what I was looking for.
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....He told me the full story of his uncle, James Dunbar Lang - one of America's foremost experts on Poe - and his 'translation' of the Voynich manuscript. Lang had reasoned that even if a great deal of ink had peeled off the vellum, it should have left some faint signs. He had huge blow-up photographs made, and claimed that this enabled him to 'complete' the damaged characters. He then discovered, according to his nephew, that the manuscript was written in mediaeval Arabic characters, in a mixture of Greek and Latin. He translated the manuscript, and discovered it to be the famous Necronomicon, or at least, a part of it. He now became convinced that the remainder of the manuscript was to be found in England, for he believed that the stories of the Welsh writer, Arthur Machen, prove that Machen had examined the complete Necronomicon at some time. In Machen's home town, Lang became acquainted with another occultist, a mad colonel, named Urquart, who, according to Lang's nephew, was the villain of the piece.
For the mad colonel somehow convinced Lang that Machen's legend of a strange, ancient people, living underground in the Black Hills, was literally true. And from this point onward, Julian Lang explained, his uncle became the victim of an obsession - the belief that these strange people - or forces, for he believed them to be bodiless - were planning to take over the earth. He wrote letters to famous people, urging them to wake up to the danger. And finally, he became convinced that the President of the United States could save the world by ordering underground atomic explosions. Lang's family had warned everybody - including the President's secretary - that the old man was harmlessly mad. And when a privately chartered plane, carrying Lang and Colonel Urquart disappeared between Charlottesville and Washington, the family was secretly relieved. Lang had apparently written a pamphlet about these 'things' that intended to take over the world, and at the time of his death, the manuscript was in the hands of a Charlottesville printer. The family was not entirely in favour of suppressing it - Charles apparently wanted it issued in a limited edition, with an explanatory note about his uncle's final illness - but a fire at the printers removed the cause of the dispute.
'How did the printers catch fire?' I asked.
'Oh, some madman with a grievance. He used to work for the printer and got dismissed for dishonesty...'
There was no need for Lang to finish the story. I knew the rest.
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....We were both relaxed, drinking our coffee, our minds temporarily 'idling'. We both sat thinking, staring at the manuscript. We had the same thought: if only the interference would stop, so that we could gain some insight into its history... Littleway said: 'I think you're probably right about the interference. It's purely automatic.' We both made an effort to 'see' the history of the manuscript, but it was like trying to push down a stone wall.
Littleway said: 'You know, if it is automatic, we ought to be able to do something about it.'
'What?'
'Well, supposing we both tried to grasp it together? Two minds ought to be twice as strong as one.'
This had not struck me, for I had not seen it as a question of force.
'Let's try.'
We both concentrated on the manuscript, drifting into a state of detachment, trying to see it from a 'distance', as it were. At first it seemed to make no difference. Then, after about minute, I had a distinct sensation of meaning. Littleway had it too; he glanced at me in triumph. We returned to our concentration. The sweat rolled down my forehead, and every muscle in my body was tense. Then a curious thing happened. I became aware of Littleway's concentration too. I can only explain it in this way. Supposing two men stand shoulder to shoulder and try to move an enormous rock that is embedded in the ground. It remains absolutely solid, and neither of them is aware of the other's effort, for each is concentrating wholly on pushing. Then the rock moves very slightly, and both increase their efforts. It moves more, and now each of them is aware of the help of the other, for the rock is now returning their pressure, and each can feel the effect of the other's effort.
This is what happened with us. We became aware of one another's minds pushing at the barrier. And like the two men pushing the rock, we ceased to move independently, and locked our minds so that our efforts were concerted.
And now, very slowly, the rock-like barrier began to give. More and more meaning became visible. It ceased to be merely a heap of yellowed parchment; its history began to form around it. It was an exciting sensation, as if someone had opened a window and let in a breeze smelling of melting snow and spring flowers. Our minds could move, and I realised that the 'barrier' had been some kind of a lock on the mind. It was quite simple. The manuscript possessed emanations that acted upon the sleep centre of the brain. But it would be a mistake to think of these emanations as a kind of odour issuing from the manuscript, for an odour would be constant, and these emanations were dormant until there was an attempt to 'see' the manuscript's history. They could be compared to a kind of burglar alarm that would not operate unless there was an attempt to 'break in'. Littleway and I had simply forced the thing to a limit - for one must imagine a burglar alarm that rings louder and louder, the harder the burglar tries to break in.
Quite suddenly, all resistance disappeared; the history of the manuscript lay open to us.
And at the same moment, we both became aware of something else - something that temporarily destroyed all interest in the manuscript. The 'alarm' had wakened something up. We both knew this instantly. And then we also realised that so far, neither of us had dealt directly with the Great Old Ones, but only with their robot servants.
It was completely impossible to describe what happened, for this was a direct intuition or feeling - like sitting on a log and discovering it is a crocodile. It might convey something of the terror of that moment if I say that it was just as if a giant black face had suddenly appeared in the sky over Philadelphia, a great face with yellow eyes and a beast's fangs. We had awakened some vast, sleeping force, and its movement was like a psychic explosion, some great spiritual earthquake.
We were both petrified. We felt like someone who walks into a cave, and stumbles upon some sleeping monster, that growls and stirs. Suddenly, I understood the meaning of Lovecraft's line: 'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.' No wonder Lovecraft had nightmares that destroyed his health; through some strange gift of second sight, he understood the sheer size and power of the Old Ones.
Neither of us dared to breathe; we wanted to efface ourselves completely. For this 'thing' seemed to shake the earth; it was a power that could have wiped out Philadelphia like a man stamping on an ant hill.
We sat there for more than an hour. I am glad that no one came into the room; it would have disturbed our stillness, and perhaps warned 'It' of our presence. And yet I had no idea that we had been there for an hour; I would have guessed five minutes. Our concentration was so intense that all physical processes seemed to stop.
We had no idea of whether the 'Thing' was aware of us. I am inclined to believe it was not. It stirred in its sleep, looked around for a moment, saw nothing of interest, and gradually drifted back to sleep.'
And as we sat there, we both had the same vision: of the horror that would ensue if the 'Thing' woke up.
We had visions of mountains ripped apart, of the ocean bed opening into an immense gulf into which the whole Pacific Ocean would vanish, of continents folded and crumpled like sheets of paper. The whole earth could be crushed out of shape, as easily as a powerful man could crush a ripe orange in his fist.
Gradually, the sense of earthquake died away. It was terrifying while it lasted, for we were both so dearly aware that this was not calculated movement, but only uneasy stirrings. If the 'Thing' woke up any more, there was no telling what might happen; even its stirrings were like the eruption of Krakatoa.
When everything was quiet again, we both became aware that the Voynich manuscript had 'closed' again. It was completely impenetrable. But I had glimpsed enough, in the few seconds before 'It' had stirred, to know most of the answers to the problems that troubled me.
Yes, 'they' had created human beings as their servants. 'They' had power, but no precision. And for long ages, human beings served them faithfully, and were allowed insights into many secrets. And then their Masters had brought the great disaster upon themselves, something so cataclysmic that it had destroyed most of the human race. But before they succumbed, they saw their danger: that their servants would themselves become the masters of the earth, and learn the ancient secrets.
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