Nyarlathotep - HP Lovecraft

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Nyolototep by H. P. Lovecraft Niolatotev Crawling Chaos. I am
the last I will tell the audient void. I do
not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago.
The general tension was horrible. To a season of political

(00:23):
and social upheaval. Was added a strange and brooding apprehension
of hideous physical danger, a danger widespread and all embracing,
such a danger as may be imagined only in the
most terrible phanfasms of the night. I recall that the
people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered

(00:47):
warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or
acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of
monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the
abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men
shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a demoniac

(01:11):
alteration in the sequence of the seasons. The autumn heat
lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps
the universe, had passed from the control of known gods
or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

(01:32):
And it was then that nyar Latotep came out of Egypt.
Who he was none could tell, but he was of
the old native blood and looked like a pharaoh. The
fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why.
He said he had risen up out of the blackness
of twenty seven centuries, and that he had heard messages

(01:55):
from places not on this planet. Into the land of
civilization came Yarlatotep, swore the slender and sinister, always buying
strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into
instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences of

(02:17):
electricity and psychology, and gave exhibitions of power which sent
his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to
exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep and shuddered,
And where nyarlato Deep went, rest vanished, for the small

(02:41):
hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before
had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem.
Now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep
in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might
less horribly disturb the pale pity moon as it glimmered

(03:01):
on green waters, gliding under bridges and old steeples crumbling
against the sickly sky. I remember when Nyarlavotev came to
my city, the great vihole, of the terrible city of
unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and
of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and

(03:24):
I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My
friends said they were horrible and impressive, beyond my most
fevered imaginings. And what was thrown on the screen in
the darkened room prophecied things. None but Nyarlapotev dared prophecy.
And in the sputter of his sparks, there was taken

(03:47):
from men that which had never been taken before yet,
which should only in the eyes. And I heard it
hinted abroad at those who knew narlavo dem looked on
sights which others saw not. It was in the hot
autumn that I went through the night with the restless

(04:09):
crowds to see Yarlatotep through the stifling night and up
the endless stairs into the choking room. And shadowed on
a screen. I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow
evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments, and I saw

(04:31):
the world battling against blackness, against the waves of destruction
from ultimate space, whirling, churning, struggling around the dimming, cooling sun.
Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators,
and hair stood up on end, whilst shadows more grotesque

(04:52):
than I can tell, came out and squatted on the heads.
And when I, who was colder and more scientific than
the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about imposture and static electricity,
your lap drove us all out down the dizzy stairs
into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud

(05:16):
that I was not afraid, but I never could be afraid,
and others screamed with me. For solace, we swore to
one another that the city was exactly the same and
still alive. And when the electric lights began to fade,
we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed

(05:38):
at the queer faces we made. I believe we felt
something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we
began to depend on its light. We drifted into curious,
involuntary marching formations, and seemed to know our destinations, though

(05:59):
we dared not think of them. Once we looked at
the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass,
with scarce a line of rusted metal to shoe where
the tramways had run, And again we saw a tramcar
lone window lists dilapidated and almost on its side. When
we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the

(06:22):
third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette
of the second tower was ragged at the top. We
then split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed
drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow
alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a

(06:42):
shocking moan. Another file down a weed choked subway entrance,
howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column
was sucked toward the open country, and presently I felt
a chill which was not of the hot autumn. For
as we stalked out on the dark moar, we beheld
around us the hellish moon, glitter of evil snows, trackless,

(07:07):
inexplicable snows swept asunder in one direction only where lay
a gulf, all the blacker for its glittering walls. The
column seemed very thin. Indeed, as it plodded dreamily into
the gulf, I lingered behind, for the black rift in
the green glittered snow was frightful, and I thought I

(07:29):
had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my
companions vanished. But my power to linger was slight, as
if beckoned by those who had gone before. I half
floated between the titanic snow drifts, quivering and afrayed into
the sightless vortex of the unimaginable, screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious.

(07:54):
Only the gods that were can tell A sick and
sensitive shadow, writhing in hands that are not hands, and
whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation corpses of
dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that
brushed the pallid stars and made them flicker low beyond

(08:17):
the world's vague ghosts of monstrous things, half seen columns
of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space
and reach up the dizzy vacua above the spheres of
light and darkness, and through this revolting graveyard of the universe,
the muffled, maddening beating of drums and thin, monotonous whine

(08:42):
of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time, the
detestable pounding and piping, whereon to dance slowly, awkwardly and absurdly,
the gigantic tanepres ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles,

(09:08):
whose soul is Nyarlato temp end of Nyarlotte,