Dagon by H. P. Lovecraft
Written July 1917
Published November 1919 in The Vagrant, No. 11, 23-29.
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.
Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone, makes life endurable, I
can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the
squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a
degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though
never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.
It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the
packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war
was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk
to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her
crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So
liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I
managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of
time.
When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings.
Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was
somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or
coastline was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly
beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the
shores of some habitable land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair
in my solitude upon the heaving vastness of unbroken blue.
The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber,
though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awakened, it was to
discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended
about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay
grounded some distance away.
Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so
prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified
than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which
chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish,
and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the
unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable
hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing
within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very
Dagon
completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a
nauseating fear.
The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless
cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I crawled into the
stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my position. Through some
unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to
the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden
under unfathomable watery depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had
risen beneath me, that I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my
ears as I might. Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.
For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and
afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day progressed, the
ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling
purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself a
pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the
vanished sea and possible rescue.
On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The odour of
the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind so
slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day I forged steadily westward,
guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher than any other elevation on the rolling
desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled toward the
hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By
the fourth evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher
than it had appeared from a distance, an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief
from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the hill.
I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically
gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration,
determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to
endure again. And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day.
Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy;
indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset.
Picking up my pack, I started for the crest of the eminence.
I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague horror
to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound and
looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the
moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine. I felt myself on the edge of the world,
peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran
curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and Satan's hideous climb through the
unfashioned realms of darkness.
Dagon
As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were
not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded
fairly easy footholds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity
became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I
scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing
into the Stygian deeps where no light had yet penetrated.
All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite slope,
which rose steeply about a hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed whitely in
the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of
stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct impression that its contour
and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with
sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an
abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived
beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk
had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.
Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist's or archaeologist's
delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith, shone
weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed
the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both
directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the
wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith, on whose surface I could now trace
both inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics
unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books, consisting for the most
part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans,
molluscs, whales and the like. Several characters obviously represented marine things
which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed
on the ocean-risen plain.
It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible
across the intervening water on account of their enormous size was an array of bas-reliefs
whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Dore. I think that these things were
supposed to depict men -- at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shown
disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some
monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms
I dare not speak in detail, for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque
beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general
outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging
eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have
been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the
creatures was shown in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than
himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment
decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring
tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the
Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past
Dagon
beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon
cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.
Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the
thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it
darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its
gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain
measured sounds. I think I went mad then.
Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the
stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I
was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I
reached the boat; at any rate, I knew that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which
Nature utters only in her wildest moods.
When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by the
captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean. In my delirium
I had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention. Of any land
upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist
upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated
ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine
legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional,
I did not press my inquiries.
It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried
morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its
clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for
the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if
it could not all have been a pure phantasm -- a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken
and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask
myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot
think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very
moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone
idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked
granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their
reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind -- of a day when the land
shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering
against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!