What would ever cause a civilization spanning thousands of years to disappear, seemingly overnight? Is it some crop blight, after a bad winter or heavy summer rain? Maybe a sort of… bureaucratic disarray? But civilizations of that might should be immune to happenings of this sort. Even so, cultures as advanced as those of, maybe three hundred years prior, looked as though they just vanished, along with many of their writings and cities. Much of them are now rot and dust, gathering and piling in tombs robbed of their masters. Could there be something bigger at play than what the conventional archeology seemed to indicate?
That, and much else I wondered whilst visiting the ruins of Mycenae, its hilly mausoleums and the bodies of Kings it should have held. Those people had long disappeared, and a lot of the extravagance and beauty their palaces held long vanished, but their cyclopean walls and strange scriptures still stood to document their greatness. The same I saw inside the Daedalian complex of Knosos a few days prior, where I thought of the seafarers of old, trading their gold and copper, and spice and obsidian those many millennia ago.
All this, I wrote about in my notes, where I held detailed accounts of what I observed and thought, and discovered in all those places I went. And I had been many places of cultural significance, being an archaeologist for nearly two decades. Graduating from Oxford in 1904, I was, what you would call, an adventurer before a scientist. I'd lived in England for all my life, but was really of mixed blood, my father, Abdul, being an Arab that settled into Britain. After graduation, I travelled through the British isles, taking note of anything that caught my eye, in Wales, Scotland and the Scottish isles, the celtic isle of Man, Cornwall and England. I learned of the celtic cultures there, before the Angles and Saxons invaded, and of the celtic cultures in France and Germany, and their minglings with the Romans and Greeks and such. I ventured through the Americas, both Latin and south, learning of the oppression the Aztecs and Incas and all the Indians suffered in the hands of the pale men, but also of the civilizations their ancestors held.
And after seeing all those dead and oppressed peoples, I decided I would try my hand at seeing the societies before the collapse, in the valley of the Nile and Mesopotamia, the warriors of Mycenae and the seamen of Minoan crete and the Cyclades. And so, after visiting Mycenace, the Cyclades and seeing Phaestos and Knosos in crete, I decided to head to the nearby city of Heraclion to catch a ship for Egypt, after, of course, I catch my breath for a few days. I stayed at an old, run down inn, where not many people shared my enthusiasm for antiquities. This didn't bother me much, since it gave me time to sort through my notes and thoughts while waiting for my ship to arrive.
There had been reports of strange people in the dusk days of the Bronze Age, ones wielding gray iron, wrought from the guts of the earth. I don't know, and I don't think anybody does, of their origin, or their fate.
"The unruly Sherden whom no one had ever known how to combat, they came boldly sailing in their warships from the midst of the sea, none being able to withstand them", wrote the great Ozymandias, Emperor of Egypt at the time.
The art of scriptures and inscriptions was forgotten, deemed as no longer necessary, as the societies devolved into more family based communities. Some point to the Thyra eruption as a catalyzing event in the falling of Minoan crete, and the descent of warrior tribes into Peloponnese, the Mycenaean stronghold.
I set out for Giza in a dreary mood, refusing to believe that such antique civilizations fell before some sailing barbarians and abandoned their cultural centers for seemingly no reason. There should be some bigger force at play here. The thought greatly excited me, even though it should merely be some childish pondering, it still made my hairs stand up.
After a few days, I arrived below the scorching Egyptian sun, and caught a thin river boat to reach Giza. I took some time to relax as the snake-like boat slithered its way into the ancient city. I carelessly gazed at the flow of the mighty river, as I hadn't even bothered to pay for a large riverboat, and the stream was just a pace below my face. I could almost see its basin, that crystallic was the hot water flowing just past my head. As I eventually got bored of looking at the stream –I don't know how I found myself in boredom of such a view- I started giving looks around me, and my eyes almost instantly fell at the boatman. He was a peculiar individual, unwilling to even mutter a word, and seeming as if distant from people. I tried asking him about the venture's length –in English, at first- but all I received as a response, was his silence, with his back turned on me. I was a little bit annoyed by his response, or lack thereof anyways, so I tried asking once again, in fluent Greek. His back stayed the same, almost snake-like and cold, and I again received no response. I tried one last hand at the question, containing within myself sighs of frustration, this time in my somewhat broken Persian.
As soon as two heartbeats passed, I felt a cold chill down my spine, and the hairs of my neck stood up. The sun almost cooled down, if it wasn't my imagination, and the seabirds instantly took off, as if I'd shot a revolver round in the air. The boatman, with a stone-cold voice, barely audible said those following words, in the exact order that I write them:
"Fllagenr' lui fer pwsnidd 'lui asgger, fllagennaer' lui fer ist lethoggenidd, asedd uranoi fer ist caecloidd"
Those unknown words were immediately etched in my mind, as my blood run chilling through my arteries. I sat unmoving, unthinking for hours in the boat, almost until we reached Giza. Vague ideas about the language's origins started forming in my head, but I couldn't place it anywhere. The grammatical structure seemed vaguely Indo-european, maybe even teutonic, but the word sounds sounded celtic, with even a hint of African-Semitic, while the flowing and rhythm of the lyrical-sounding sentence, even spoken through the mouth of the boatman, sounded like Sanskrit. All those had little to no correlation with each other, but somehow seemed to fit into each other, like a perfectly assembled jigsaw puzzle.
As I returned to my senses, I noticed the air pressure being back to normal, and I took to writing down what I heard in my notes, and maybe even relaxing and unclouding my head a little bit. We had almost reached the city anyways, for it was within eyeshot, and I could see the unique architecture that adorned it. When we eventually arrived, and I got out of the boat, the boatman simply gestured to the road heading toward Giza, and turned to leave. I tried to pay him some coin, pretending to be the least courteous in the face of such a historic city, but he simply ignored me, took to his boat, and went even further down the great river. Entering the city, I could her the imam chanting the Fajr, and even though I hadn't any faith in the Islamic, or any religion, I still enjoyed its rhythm and tune. It was still really early morning, and the people hadn't taken to their work just yet, so I took the opportunity to have a gander at the simple, stone-masoned or adobe houses and coffee shops, sitting next to grandiose mosques of elegant design. I had a slow, browsing walk at the city until the shops and taverns opened and I had some food, at which point I eagerly headed toward the necropolis, literally meaning "City of the Dead" in greek.
The pyramid complex was a massive array of structures, not only pyramids, but also tombs reserved for the builders, and of course, their quarters, and several temples, with a definite highlight if you would ever visit being the great Sphinx, guarding the complex. One would not believe such feats of civilization, arts, architecture and mathematics if he wasn't present to see them. How could one have forseen the fall of a culture of such might as the one before me? Are stones and rot and dust all that was left? I returned to my original, naïve ponderings about bright civilizations of epics, and as if the skies heard my thought, they conjured a gust so strong, I would have gotten blind from the sands if I hadn't covered my eyes on time. The gust lasted for many seconds, and guided the sand to whip my body with a force I never would have expected. And as the winds settled, I found myself gazing at a stele I'd never even read of before. Why was it here, and had really no other scientist claim to have found it, or was it just my boastfulness talking? Either way, I decided to lay a better look at its surface.
As my hand touched it to wipe off any sand from its surface, an electrifying shock coursed through my body, starting from my hand, reaching my toes, and then finally, the far reaches of my mind. If I wanted to take my hand away, or even to stir or shiver, my body wouldn't let me. My hand was fixed to the stone, and my body no longer obeyed me as much as it did the stele. Images and imaginations, or realities were etched into my mind as if with a scalpel, ones of dreaming dead warriors, wielding weapons one would never even conceive. Impending catastrophes, waiting for their key in the cosmic rhythm to be unleashed. And, at last, after hundreds of similar images had passed, there came a deafening silence, or was it… blindness, I seem to somewhat recall? I knew not to piece together the dissociated knowledge that had stockpiled in my head at that moment of trance, for if I did, and if I placed my position in it, I would surely go mad. Something cloudy began to form in my head, but I didn't understand what, at the time.
And then, my trance was broken. It could have lasted days or seconds or a moment, for all I know. And then the now dark skies turned blue and scorching again, it seems they had darkened after my vision. I wanted to run away, and I still don't understand what kept me from doing so. It should have been the inherent curiosity all us humans carry, but I decided to keep on, to decode the new Rosetta stone. There where two columns, one of High Egyptian Hieroglyphics, looking as if more recently carved, maybe even in haste, and one of some writing I couldn't read. It seemed vaguely familiar. I thought I recalled knowing the sentence at some point, and I thought right, because after giving the matter some thought, I decided the phrase I'd heard the old boatman repeat; "Fllagenr' lui fer pwsnidd 'lui asgger, fllagennaer' lui fer ist lethoggenidd, asedd uranoi fer ist caecloidd" seemed eerily similar to the inscription in the structure.
I decided to try using the cross-referencing method between the hieroglyphics and the other language, pioneered by Young, and improved by the great Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion. I'd given a dusting in my knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics, as well as Linear B and the cuneiforms of Sumeria and Akkad. I hadn't really bothered with the Linear A used in crete, since it was, and still is, indecipherable. What I read by this cross-referencing, was, in free translation, the following;
"The Gods will descend from the stars, the non-gods (maybe 'fake gods', or 'idols'?) will be forgotten, as the world is reborn (original was roughly 'circled', 'come into circle')"
As I deciphered that last word, caecloidd, my head was split in pain, and I whited out, unconscious, but not before one last image flashed into my mind. This time it was a familiar location. One of ruins and statues, further south along the Nile. Built by Ozymandias, the great Ramses II, the Abu Simbel.
I woke up in a daze, as if I'd just drunk half of Queen Anne's cargo by myself. I helped myself stand up, and I knew by then that my equilibrium was severely disturbed. I couldn't see the stele anywhere, but there was no need to, in actuality, I still vividly remember every syllable of the phrase, and every last indentation in the stone carving. I knew now where I needed to go. And I started slowly walking toward the river to catch another boat and head further south, to the Nubian lands.
The sky was now scarlet, I would even say lacerated. I half-trotted my way to the river, several miles from the necropolis, and stood in the Nile's bank waiting for a boat to pass, staring emptily, with an emotionless mask in my face. A boat finally passed, and I went my way toward the south. I never noticed the crystal water this time, or the games of the clouds and the sun, or even any of the boatman's ramblings, if he had any to offer. It must have rained, I believe, I felt my skin a bit cold later, and wet. Neither did my thoughts trail towards my new knowledge, I just sat cross-legged on the boat, staring coldly in space. Sometime, the boatman asked something, maybe how far along I was going, or trying to strike up some conversation about something. Oh, how blessed is he, who concerned himself with the nothingness of his fine words… how orderly a life would be for someone who hasn't acquired the wisdom I now have? And how mundane my life is before one who has pieced together that wisdom, completing the puzzle that is the existence? Even then, even when the message I received was enough to turn me hysteric and half-insane, I knew I had but a fraction of the creation in my mind, and I thirsted for it all. I don't know what I answered the boatman, but at least he piped down from then on, and I felt free to meditate on my silence, or whatever it was I was doing.
We sometimes stopped at various cities or towns, maybe for the boatman to have a drink or meal, or to stretch his legs. I didn't really feel like I needed any of that. I didn't have to rely on those minute pleasures in my mind, I had already set a goal to follow.
The boatman stopped some few hundred miles from the temple, and told me he wouldn't, or couldn't go any further. I paid him with whatever coin was in my pockets, which must have been much, judging from his face, but I didn't bother checking. I walked toward the general direction of the temple, I didn't know exactly where it was, but some sixth sense slowly guided me to it, sure and steady. I should have been really exhausted, and my body had a real difficulty keeping up with my wants, but I pressed on through the endless dessert. One night, when my body couldn't keep on anymore, I fainted in those dunes, and woke up a few hours later. As I looked down and tried to get up, a slip of paper fell from my pocket, and, wanting or not, I had a glimpse of it. It was a photograph I'd taken myself a few days prior to my journey. Photography was one of my hobbies, but the equipment was heavy, and I needed preparation and time to expose the images, and couldn't walk around with a flash powder loaded gun for instants now, could I? My god, I missed spending my time like that, quietly, with my cameras, and my studies, and my books. Where did all the good food go, and my family, and my friends back in Oxford or Paris at the café or the bistrot.
And my mind snapped back into reality, at least for a little while. I was immediately folded in half by my hunger, and my throat immediately went ashy from the thirst and the dehydration. But I was happy, to at least have broken the connection with that stone tablet, or the God it served and the powers it obeyed. I no longer cared for attaining madness in an ancient temple, made by a narcissistic Pharaoh, in the command of a mad God. I knew I was going to die that night, either from hunger, or thirst, or both, but at least I would die sane. But oh, the God didn't want that. As I held the photograph with my hands, staring at it, trying not to waste my precious fluids on tears, it immediately burst in some cold flame of a sort, and turned to ashes.
My gaze turned lizard like again, slowly, uncaring of the last scramble of my brain to hold on to that last thread of warmth and love for all that is good. My spirit was purged out of me by the hand of that God in an instant, and I went back to the search of His temple. But the God had decided to show His (the correct characterization would be 'It') justness, and Its mercy, and I was placed outside the temple, gently, laying on the sands. I woke up in the morning, by the scorching rays of the Egyptian sun. I felt my body weak no more, fed and given water by the all-merciful God. I stood right outside the temple's gate, with four colossal statues of the seated pharaoh, Ozymandias, Lord of higher and lower Egypt guarding it. Several other statues were standing guard to the Pharaoh, Nefertari, his queen, his mother, and his sons and daughters. Carved magnificently, from unknown sculptors and architects, their commanding sneer reached throughout all the dunes and Nile, carefully examining. With complete disregard to those, I had important matters to attend, I walked through the temple's gate. The interior of the halls of the temple was also filled with the dessert sand that adorned most of Egypt, attesting to the fact that the years had not been kind to the late Pharaoh.
I walked into the last chamber of the temple, the sanctuary, the only one not filled with statues and depictions of the now, just rude Ramses. It was completely dark there, I couldn't see anything. If one visits the sanctuary in the day of the summer solstice, the sun would shine through and light the chamber in midday. But that didn't matter to me now, for I had my guidance. I sat there for several hours, cross-legged with an empty head, waiting for the arrival of my God.
And then after all that meditation, the Lord came down from the skies, or It spawned from the guts of hell -it didn't really matter- slowly, filling the sanctuary with the gravity of Its existence. One shouldn't ever describe the form of this one, the sheer magnitude of his presence would turn one blind and mad.
A lightning bolt came down from the skies, and passed through the stone temple, into my forehead. The many eyes, physical and not, of the God gazed and searched through every inch and speck of my body, I screamed at the top of my lungs, until my vocal cords burst in blood, and my eardrums shattered by the sheer volume of my shrieks. The bolt of electricity, among infinite other energies invaded my head and dispersed though my wit. The scattered knowledge within my head was finally pieced together after all this time, and I saw the entirety of the world, its past and future and present.
I saw the Yamaraja, the God of the lower realms and his army of demons, and Chaos, who birthed Gaia who birthed Ouranos, father of the titans, forefather to the Greek Gods in Olympus, all cowering in sight of Its dread and might. I saw all the saints and sinners, the Tyrants and the generals, endlessly spilling blood and scheming Machiavelliantly to further their dominion what they all considered to be the whole Cosmos. I now knew the truth behind the vanishing of Mycenae and the People of the Indus valley, and I knew that, before the beauty and the horrors and terrors that the real universe held. Compared to that, a few stones clamped together seemed now mundane. And compared to that, our modern cultures and bombs and mass murder of the Great war were mere games. The things I saw would make a normal human shiver so that his back snapped in half, and shed tears that would suck all the blood and water from his body. But my devotion to my God was so, that I recognized Its works as works of mercy. My God was above all that, and that material universe. He simply wanted my, and every man's absolute devotion, service and love directed to It. And having seen his greatness, I knew it should be my life's work to bring that to It. I had now been marked as a messenger of the God. And It was, simply, the God. The Judeans may call It Yhwh, and the Vaishnavas Krsna or Vishnu, or Odin, or Dias, but all those names describe only a small percentile of the whole.
I now knew it. I knew everything. There was nothing else to learn. Just knowing what I knew and visualizing it burned my eyes, but I didn't need them anymore. I knew and sensed and saw everything already. I couldn't just see something with my material eyes, I knew everything about it. And the God turned me into a vassal for himself, and it was through me that he would spread that love and devotion he sought and deserved.
The body of Alhazred will not last long. It will be torn by the energies coursing through it soon, and bring me relief. I know about you, I've watched you, in your bed while you sleep, or in your last dying breath, I've watched you. You'll piece together that knowledge I've already pieced, and you'll know why death is a blessing soon. And of course, if even you don't want to know, if you don't want to associate yourself with the divine, there's always that urge, that whirling of your gut and that frenzy to know about it all, those devils and specters and eldriches in the depths of Hades and the bottom of Achelous. That sense, to attend realization about It, to know what it's like to sit in the tail of a dying pulsar, or sense the scorch of the molten iron and iridium in your veins after you submerge yourself in hell, to find that other chained God of the Byblos, and ask him of his defiance against the God. You'll never stop wandering far and inching close, and you will, believe me, one day know of the might of that real, morbid God.