Chapter 1 The Horror in Clay “Of such great powers or beings t | The Call of Cthulhu (Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston) by H

Chapter 1
The Horror in Clay
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a
survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote period when . . . con-
sciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long
since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms
of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory
and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and
kinds . . . ”
— Algernon Blackwood
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance
in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the
deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle
wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have
hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not
masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the
single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and
maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of
truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—
in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I
hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I
shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the
professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that
he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.