Read Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath for Free Online

genius.
    Certainly that last safari was his physical end. He who before had been straight and strong, for a man his age, with jet hair and a constant smile, was now seen to walk with a pronounced stoop and had lost a lot of weight. His hair had greyed and his smile had become rare and
    nervous while a distinct tic jerked the flesh at the corner of his mouth.
    Before these awful deteriorations made it possible for his erstwhile ‘friends’
    to ridicule him, before the expedition, Sir Amery had deciphered or translated (I know little of these things) a handful of decaying, centuried shards known in archaeological circles as the G’harne Fragments. Though he would never fully discuss his findings I knew it was that which he learned which sent him, ill-fated, into Africa.
    He and a handful of personal friends, all equally learned gentlemen, ventured into the interior seeking a legendary city which Sir Amery believed had existed centuries before the foundations were cut for the pyramids. Indeed, according to his calculations, Man’s primal ancestors were not yet conceived when G’harne’s towering ramparts first reared their monolithic sculptings to predawn skies. Nor with regard to the age of the place, if it existed at all, could my uncle’s claims be disproved; new tests on the G’harne Fragments had shown them to be pre-Triassic, and their very existence, in any form other than centuried dust, was impossible to explain.
    It was Sir Amery, alone and in a terrible condition, who staggered upon an encampment of savages five weeks after setting out from the native village where the expedition had last had contact with civilization. No doubt the ferocious men who found him would have done away with him there and then but for their superstitions. His wild appearance and the strange tongue in which he screamed, plus the fact that he had emerged from an area which was taboo in their tribal legends, stayed their hands. Eventually they nursed him back to a semblance of health and conveyed him to a more civilized region whence he was slowly able to make his way back to the outside world. Of the expedition’s other members nothing has since been
    seen or heard. Only I know the story, having read it in the letter my uncle left me, but more of that later …
    Following his lone return to England, Sir Amery developed those eccentricities already mentioned, and the merest hint or speculation on the part of outsiders with reference to the disappearance of his colleagues was sufficient to start him raving horribly of such inexplicable things as ‘a buried land where Shudde-M’ell broods and bubbles, plotting the destruction of the human race and the release from his watery prison of Great Cthulhu When he was asked officially to account for his missing companions, he said that they had died in an earthquake; and though, reputedly, he was asked to clarify his answer, he would say no more.
    Thus, being uncertain as to how he would react to questions about his expedition, I was loath to ask him of it. However, on those rare occasions when he saw fit to talk of it without prompting, I listened avidly; for I, as much if not more so than others, was eager to have the mystery cleared up.
    He had been back only a few months when he suddenly left London and invited me up to his cottage, isolated here on the Yorkshire Moors, to keep him company.
    This invitation was a thing strange in itself, as he was one who had spent months in absolute solitude in various far-flung desolate places and liked to think of himself as something of a hermit. I accepted, for I saw the perfect chance to get a little of that peaceful quiet which I find particularly beneficial to my writing.
    One day, shortly after I had settled in, Sir Amery showed me a pair of strangely beautiful pearly spheres. They measured about four inches in diameter, and, though he had been unable to positively identify the material from which they were made, he was able to say that it appeared