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seemed impossible for the vocal cords of man to emulate. Yet my uncle was weirdly fluent with it, and I scribbled down an oft-repeated sentence-sequence in what I considered the nearest written approximation of the spoken words I could find. These words - or at least sounds - were:
    Ce’haaie ep-ngh fl’hur G’harne fhtagn,
    Ce’haaie fhtagn ngh Shudde-M’ell.
    Hai G’harne orr’e ep fl’hur,
    Shudde-M’ell ican-icanicas fl’hur orr’e G’harne.
    Though at the time I found the thing impossible to pronounce as I heard it, I have since found that with each passing day, oddly, the pronunciation of those lines becomes easier - as if with the approach of some obscene horror I grow more capable of expressing myself in that horror’s terms. Perhaps it is just that lately in my dreams, I have found occasion to mouth those very words, and, as all things are far simpler in dreams, my fluency has passed over into my waking hours.
    But that does not explain the tremors - the same inexplicable tremors which so terrorized my uncle. Are the shocks which cause the ever-present quiverings of the seismograph stylus merely the traces of some vast, subter-rene cataclysm a thousand miles deep and five thousand miles away - or are they caused by something else? Something so outri and fearsome that my mind freezes when I am tempted to study the problem too closely.
    There came a time, after I had been with him for a number of weeks, when it seemed plain that Sir Amery was rapidly recovering. True, he still retained his stoop, though to me it seemed no longer so pronounced, and his so-called
    ‘eccentricities’, but he was more his old self in other ways. The nervous tic had left his face completely and his cheeks had regained something of their former colour. His improvement, I conjectured, had much to do with his never-ending studies of the seismograph; for I had established by that time that there was a definite connection between the measurements of that machine and my uncle’s illness. Nevertheless, I was at a loss to understand why the internal movements of the Earth should so determine the state of his nerves.
    It was after a trip to his room, to look at that instrument, that he told me more of dead G’harne. It was a subject I should have attempted to steer him away from.
    ‘The fragments,’ he said, ‘told the location of a city the name of which, G’harne, is known only in legend and which has in the past been spoken of on a par with Atlantis, Mu, and R’lyeh. A myth and nothing more. But if you give a legend a concrete location you strengthen it
    somewhat - and if that location yields up something of the past, centuried relics of a civilization lost for aeons, then the legend becomes history.
    You’d be surprised how much of the world’s history has in fact been built up that way.
    ‘It was my hope, a hunch you might call it, that G’harne had been real; and with the deciphering of the fragments I found it within my power to prove, one way or the other, G’harne’s elder existence. I have been in some strange places, Paul, and have listened to even stranger stories. I once lived with an African tribe whose people declared they knew the secrets of the lost city, and their storytellers told me of a land where the sun never shines; where Shudde-M’ell, hiding deep in the honeycombed ground, plots the dissemination of evil and madness throughout the world and plans the resurrection of other, even worse abominations!
    ‘He hides there in the ground and awaits the time when the stars will be right, when his horrible hordes will be sufficient in number, and when he can infest the entire world with his loathsomeness and bring about the return of those others more loathsome yet!
    ‘I was told stories of fabulous star-born creatures who inhabited the Earth millions of years before Man appeared, who were still here, in certain dark places, when he eventually evolved. I tell you, Paul’ - his voice rose - ‘that they