“Good Lord, Al, what have you done?”
Clarendon smiled gently — a smile almost of peace and resignation, different indeed from the sardonic sneer of the past few weeks.
“You ought to know, Jimmy, if you’ve still the judgment that made you a governor. You must have pieced together enough from my notes to realise that there’s nothing else to do. With your marks in Greek back at Columbia I guess you couldn’t have missed much. All I can say is that it’s true.
“James, I don’t like to pass blame along, but it’s only right to tell you that Surama got me into this. I can’t tell you who or what he is, for I don’t fully know myself, and what I do know is stuff that no sane person ought to know; but I will say that I don’t consider him a human being in the fullest sense, and that I’m not sure whether or not he’s alive as we know life.
“You think I’m talking nonsense. I wish I were, but the whole hideous mess is damnably real. I started out in life with a clean mind and purpose. I wanted to rid the world of fever. I tried and failed — and I wish to God I had been honest enough to say that I’d failed. Don’t let my old talk of science deceive you, James — I found no antitoxin and was never even half on the track of one!
“Don’t look so shaken up, old fellow! A veteran politician-fighter like you must have seen plenty of unmaskings before. I tell you, I never had even the start of a fever cure. But my studies had taken me into some queer places, and it was just my damned luck to listen to the stories of some still queerer people. James, if you ever wish any man well, tell him to keep clear of the ancient, hidden places of the earth. Old backwaters are dangerous — things are handed down there that don’t do healthy people any good. I talked too much with old priests and mystics, and got to hoping I might achieve things in dark ways that I couldn’t achieve in lawful ways.
“I shan’t tell you just what I mean, for if I did I’d be as bad as the old priests that were the ruin of me. All I need say is that after what I’ve learned I shudder at the thought of the world and what it’s been through. The world is cursed old, James, and there have been whole chapters lived and closed before the dawn of our organic life and the geologic eras connected with it. It’s an awful thought — whole forgotten cycles of evolution with beings and races and wisdom and diseases — all lived through and gone before the first amoeba ever stirred in the tropic seas geology tells us about.
“I said gone, but I didn’t quite mean that. It would have been better that way, but it wasn’t quite so. In places traditions have kept on — I can’t tell you how — and certain archaic life-forms have managed to struggle thinly down the aeons in hidden spots. There were cults, you know — bands of evil priests in lands now buried under the sea. Atlantis was the hotbed. That was a terrible place. If heaven is merciful, no one will ever drag up that horror from the deep.
“It had a colony, though, that didn’t sink; and when you get too confidential with one of the Tuareg priests in Africa, he’s likely to tell you wild tales about it — tales that connect up with whispers you’ll hear among the mad lamas and flighty yak-drivers on the secret table-lands of Asia. I’d heard all the common tales and whispers when I came on the big one. What that was, you’ll never know — but it pertained to somebody or something that had come down from a blasphemously long time ago, and could be made to live again — or seem alive again — through certain processes that weren’t very clear to the man who told me.
“Now, James, in spite of my confession about the fever, you know I’m not bad as a doctor. I plugged hard at medicine, and soaked up about as much as the next man — maybe a little more, because down there in the Hoggar country I did something no priest had ever been able to do. They led me blindfolded to a place that had been sealed up for generations — and I came back with Surama.
“Easy, James! I know what you want to say. How does he know all he knows? — why does he speak English — or any other language, for that matter — without an accent? — why did he come away with me? — and all that. I can’t tell you altogether, but I can say that he takes in ideas and images and impressions with something besides his brain and senses. He had a use for me and my science. He told me things, and opened up vistas. He taught me to worship ancient, primordial, and unholy gods, and mapped out a road to a terrible goal which I can’t even hint to you. Don’t press me, James — it’s for the sake of your sanity and the world’s sanity!