Haggopian and Other Stories

Yet even his few really close friends seemed convinced of his madness, blaming it upon his living too close to those dead and nigh-forgotten civilizations which so fascinated him. But how could it have been otherwise? My uncle was both antiquarian and archaeologist. His strange wanderings to foreign lands were not the result of any longing for personal gain or acclaim. Rather were they undertaken out of a love of the life, for any fame which resulted—as frequently occurred—was more often than not shrugged off onto the ever-willing personages of his colleagues. They envied him, those so-called contemporaries of his, and would have emulated his successes had they possessed the foresight and inquisitiveness with which he was so singularly gifted—or, as I have now come to believe, with which he was cursed. My bitterness towards them is directed by the way in which they cut him after the dreadful culmination of that last, fatal expedition. In earlier years many of them had been “made” by his discoveries but on that last trip those “hangers-on” had been the uninvited, the ones out of favour, to whom he would not offer the opportunity of fresh, stolen glory. I believe that for the greater part their assurances of his insanity were nothing more than a spiteful means of belittling his 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 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 know 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 pre-dawn skies. Nor with regard to the age of the place, if it existed at all, could my uncle’s claims be disproved. New scientific 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 from where 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 and 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 as if not more so than others, was eager to have the mystery cleared up.