An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

In “The Battle That Ended the Century,” one of two antagonists who engage in a boxing match in the year 2001. The character (nicknamed “the Terror of the Plains”) is a parody of HPL’s friend Robert E.Howard, of Cross Plains, Tex.

T’yog.

In “Out of the Æons,” the millennia-old petrified mummy housed in the Cabot Museum of Archaeology in Boston. The curator of the museum, Richard H.Johnson, thinks that the mummy is that of a man spoken of in Von Junzt’s Black BookThis man, T’yog, attempted to scale Mount Yaddith-Gho on the continent of Mu 175,000 years ago to free the people from the tyranny of the god Ghatanothoa, but was turned to stone (with his brain still living) by the god.

Typer, Alonzo Hasbrouck.

In “The Diary of Alonzo Typer,” an occult explorer from Kingston, N.Y., who investigates the spectral van der Heyl house near Attica. Typer is in fact related to the van der Heyls and has been summoned to the home for some unknown purpose.

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U

Ull.

In “‘Till A’ the Seas,’” a young man who, in the distant future, becomes the last surviving member of the human race. After tending to Mladdna, an old woman, until she dies, he seeks out what he believes to be another colony of human beings beyond the mountains, but finds it full of decaying skeletons. He dies shortly thereafter by falling into a well.

“Under the Pyramids.”

Novelette (10,950 words); ghostwritten for Harry Houdini in February 1924. First published (as “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”) in WT(May–June–July 1924); rpt. WT(June–July 1939); first collected in Marginalia;corrected text in D;annotated version in TD.

The escape artist Harry Houdini narrates in the first person an account of a peculiar adventure he experienced in Egypt. Some Arabs—led by a man who uses the name Abdul Reis el Drogman—bring Houdini to witness a boxing match on the top of the Great Pyramid; but after the fight is over the Arabs seize him and cast him, bound tightly by rope, down a spectacularly deep chasm in the Temple of the Sphinx. After awaking, he struggles not merely to escape from the temple but to answer an “idle question” that had haunted him throughout his stay in Egypt: “what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?”As he seeks an exit, Houdini encounters an immense underground cavern—“Bases of columns whose middles were higher than human sight…mere bases of things that must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance”—peopled with hideous hybrid entities. Houdini ponders the curiously morbid temperament of the ancient Egyptians, in particular their notions of the spirit or ka,which can return to its body or other bodies after it had “wandered about the upper and lower worlds in a horrible way.” There are “bloodcongealing legends” of what “decadent priestcraft” fashioned on occasion—“ composite mummies made by the artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in imitation of the elder gods.” Considering all this,

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Houdini is dumbfounded to come upon living embodimentsof such entities: “their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns…. Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches… men should not have the heads of crocodiles….”But an even greater horror is revealed by Houdini’s discovery of the answer to that “idle question” he had asked himself earlier. The composite creatures appear to be laying down huge amounts of food as offerings to some strange entity that appears fleetingly out of an aperture in the underground cavern: “It was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk… Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the excessively greatquantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture.” What could it possibly be? “The five-headed monster that emerged…that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus…the five-headed monster— and that of which it is the merest fore paw….”