Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred (26 page)

everal days’ sail above Thebes, the river Nile becomes difficult to navigate, its course broken by a series of cataracts that necessitate overland travel around the turbulent waters. Between the cataracts progress is made up the river in small boats easily overturned by the crocodiles that lie in wait for them as though for a careless cow that comes to the edge of the river to drink. With swift thrusts of their long tails these fearsome beasts can rise partially from the water to snatch a man from inside a boat, and what they take below the surface is never recovered. For this reason the masters of the boats tie the wing feathers of the bird known as the ibis to the bows, for it is the belief of those who trade along the river that the ibis and crocodile are mortal enemies, and that the crocodile fears the ibis. This is no more than a fable, for men have been snatched from boats that bear the ibis feather and, indeed, having similar feathers tied around their necks.

Above the Second Cataract the men dwelling along the Nile are no longer Egyptian but a black race having its own customs and gods. It is believed by some of our scholars that from this region of the Upper Nile the Queen of Sheba came, who visited Solomon at Jerusalem to sit at his feet and learn wisdom, but the true location of the land of Sheba has been forgotten. The gods of the people are many and savage, in accord with their nature; for the people wear little clothing and speak in a guttural tongue, and they are hostile to strangers in their villages until placated with gifts. Chief among the gods is Bes, a squat, fat savage who has even made his way to Thebes as a token of good fortune. He has no blood tie with the lineage of Egyptian gods but is a vulgar intruder in their land.

Despite their lack of social graces and the absence of notable monuments in stone that would attest to their skill as builders, the black race above the Second Cataract has generated sorcerers as potent as any in the world. They worship Yig in the living form of a great serpent or dragon that is a length of thirty paces from nose to tail, and crushes horses and oxen in its coils before swallowing them whole. This beast is larger than the basilisk but it has no venom, and relies only upon its strength to kill its prey. They also worship Tsathoggua, a god of the Old Ones, though not one of their seven lords, who is adored most often in hot and humid regions where the mud is fertile and thick with creeping things.

Of all the Old Ones, Tsathoggua is the most malicious save only for Nyarlathotep. His form is that of a great toad with the head of a man, having a wide slitted mouth and bulbous eyes. In power he equals or surpasses the lords, but at some distant age he was cast out from their midst and compelled to dwell alone and apart in the nethermost depths of the vaults of Zin, growing ever fatter and more obscene on the rivers of blood shed on his altars by his fanatical inhuman worshippers. The reason for his expulsion from the circle of lords cannot be uttered, for to reveal it is certain death, but it is the cause of the god’s constant and unending hunger, and has bearing on the fall of the Dragon into the Bottomless Pit * * * * * about which no more may be hinted.

Long after the inhuman race that worshipped him in deep caverns had decayed to mindless barbarity, the black statues of Tsathoggua were discovered abandoned in their temples in the vaults of Zin by men who ventured there, and were carried upward, eventually reaching the surface of the earth, where the cult of the toad god waxed mighty in the Black Lands. The thick blood of sacrifices spilled before the malignant gaze of his statue is used to create a kind of living ichor animated by the god and subject to his will. It is unwise to venture within a temple of Tsathoggua, for this viscose sentinel never sleeps.

The shamans of the black race of Khem, as they call the land in their own tongue, have power to control the bodies of the dead, but not after the same manner as the priests of Nyarlathotep at Thebes, for the priests of the Sphinx resurrect the mummies of those long dead to a natural life, so that their souls return to their flesh and they are in every respect as they were before death, but the shamans above the Second Cataract are only able to raise the corpses of those newly dead, and animate their bodies in an unnatural way, by the invocation of demonic spirits that are made by the power of Tsathoggua to dwell in these houses of decaying flesh. The bodies continue to corrupt after given a semblance of life, so that their term of use is limited, and eventually they fall into a putrid mass, yet still moving and aware, for the spirit inhabiting the corpse will not depart until the body has become incapable of movement.

The demons called into the dead flesh give their vessels great strength and are obedient to the shamans who summon them, for only the shamans have the knowledge to destroy these infernal spirits, although other magicians are able to call or banish them. The shamans use such shambling dead to fulfill their purposes among their people, and it is certain that a man who insults a shaman, or refuses to pay the expected offering, will be visited in the night by one of these possessed shells and murdered. This common practice has aroused great hatred among the common people against the shamans, but terror prevents them from acting to rid the land of these outrages. Each village along the river has its own head man and its own shaman and his apprentice, but the shaman rules the head man, who cannot enforce the laws without his concurrence.

In this place Christendom has no hold, nor is the faith of Islam known among this savage race. There are a scattered few who practice the ways of Moses, for the faith of the Hebrews has spread from the land of Ethiopia that lies to the east, where it has endured for centuries. How the laws of Moses became established so far south of Jerusalem is a mystery, but many assert that the Queen of Sheba, when she returned from her visit with Solomon, brought back his faith and instituted its practice. Hebrew charms are to be seen worn around the necks of the common people, who have no understanding of what the letters represent, and most frequent is the name of God with four letters, called by the Greeks
tetragrammaton
,
which simply signifies four letters.

During the day the possessed dead lie in boxes or in shallow holes beneath the earth, which does not inconvenience them for they have no need to breathe and are immune to discomfort. When the shaman who created them wishes to send them out to do his will, he summons them to him by means of a small whistle made from the thinner bone of the human forearm. The shamans regard these whistles as precious objects and never remove them from the thong around their necks. They can produce three notes that are thin and high-pitched, like the cries of soaring birds, but by varying the length and order of the notes, the sounds they make are infinite in number. To the common people of this race, no sound in the night is more terrifying than the whistle of a shaman.

After the walking corpse is called up from its repose, the shaman leads it to the house or other place where is to be found his intended victim, and gives to the corpse an object that has had close contact with the flesh of the man the possessing demon is intended to slay. Hair and nail parings are most often used, but a sweat-stained garment, a sandal, or even a dried piece of excrement will also serve. From the contact which this object once had with the person, the demon inhabiting the corpse knows who it is to kill, and proceeds directly to the unfortunate man; nor will any opposition or subterfuge turn it from its purpose, for though it moves awkwardly it never tires or ceases to pursue its intention until it has accomplished the shaman’s desire.

A young warrior who had offended the shaman of his village by refusing to pay the offering of gold demanded by the shaman managed to avoid his fate for eleven days by constant flight, during which he paused neither to eat nor to sleep, but on the twelfth night exhaustion overcame him, and the corpse walker summoned by the shaman, much putrefied and deformed by the long days spent lying in the ground under the sun and walking the paths beneath the moon, and riddled with crawling beetles and worms, strangled him in his sleep so that the exhausted youth awoke into death.

Only the shamans themselves are immune from the assassins they make, for a certain music played on the bone whistle sends the demon that inhabits the corpse flying away with a ghastly cry, and the empty human shell collapses to the ground. In this way shamans cannot prey upon their own kind, but all others—from the lowest beggar to the king of the land—are in jeopardy from their displeasure. Consequently they are treated with an exaggerated respect and accorded a dignity that is quite comical by the leaders of their race, for they are usually naked and unwashed, with their long hair plastered with mud and their faces painted. Even so, it is invariably the king who prostrates himself before the leader of the shamans, not the head shaman who grovels at the feet of the king. The leaders of the land use the arts of the shamans to discover their enemies and kill them, and in no other land is assassination by the arts of magic so assiduously practiced.

A traveler to Khem who is versed in the arts of necromancy and resolute in heart will do well to capture and abduct one of these shamans, and through torture learn the music that separates the demon from its dead husk. After killing the man and taking the bone whistle from around his neck, he will thereafter be enabled to inquire into the practices and secrets of the shamans without fear that a vitalized corpse will be sent to murder him; even so, precautions must be taken to prevent admission to the sleeping place without the raising of an alarm, for it is the sly practice of these unnatural creatures to creep upon their prey while they sleep; for this cause every shaman sleeps only while his apprentice wakes and watches.

hose departing Egypt by sea commonly do so through the port of Alexandria, established many centuries ago by the Greek conqueror of the same name during his occupation of this land. In the days of the caesars it was the greatest city of Egypt, but in recent generations its grandeur has departed and its harbor has been allowed to fill with silt, yet despite this neglect it remains the gateway for many who come to Egypt from distant lands across the sea. In other cities of the Nile, those from foreign lands are looked upon with distrust, and the locals shun communication with them, but in Alexandria a dozen different tongues may be heard by a man who stands in the market square. The most common language of the city is still Greek, for the city was built by Greeks and settled by Greeks, and many ancient and honorable families that served the administrations of the Ptolemies yet remain.