"Brian Lumley - Titus Crow 1 - The Burrowers Beneath" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

dominions? Well, the whole thing was horribly frightening, and for a long time
I morbidly collected cuttings and articles dealing with Surtsey's rising.
Nothing further occurred, however, and Surtsey eventually cooled from its
volcanic state into a new island, barren of life but still strangely
enigmatic. I have a feeling, Henri, that Surtsey was only the first step, that
those ropy things of my dreams are in fact real and that they had planned to
raise to the surface whole chains of islands and oddly-dimensioned cities -
lands drowned back in the dim mists of Earth's antiquity - in the commencement
of a concerted attack on universal sanity ... an attack led by loathly Lord
Cthulhu, his "brothers", and their minions, which once reigned here where men
reign now.'
As my friend talked, from his very first mention of the Cthulhu Cycle of myth,
I had put to use an odd ability of mine: the power of simultaneous
concentration in many directions. One part of my mind I had turned to the
absorption of all that Crow was telling me; another followed different tracks.
For I knew far more of the Cthulhu Cycle than my gaunt and work-weary friend
suspected. Indeed, since suffering certain experiences when, for a brief time,
I had owned the accursed Mirror of Queen Nitocris, I had spent much of my time
in correlating the legends and pre-human myths surrounding Cthulhu and his
contemporaries in the immemorially handed-down records.
Among such 'forbidden' books, I had read the unsup-pressed sections of the
British Museum's photostat Pna-kotic Manuscript, allegedly a fragmentary
record of a lost 'Great Race', prehistoric even in prehistory; similarly
reproduced pages from the R'lyeh Text, supposedly writ-
ten by certain minions of Great Cthulhu himself; the Unaussprechlichen Kulten
of Von Junzt and my own copy of Ludwig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis, both in
vastly expurgated editions; the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules and
Feery's often fanciful Notes on the Necron-omicon; the hideously revealing and
yet disquietingly vague Revelations of Glaaki; and those uncoded sections of
Titus Crow's priceless copy of the Cthaat Aquadingen.
I had learned, somewhat sceptically, of the forces or deities of the
unthinkably ancient mythology; of the benign Elder Gods, peacefully palaced in
Orion but ever aware of the struggle between the races of Earth and the Forces
of Evil; of those evil deities themselves, the Great Old Ones, ruled over by
(created by, originating from?) the blind idiot god Azathoth, 'the Bubbler at
the Hub', an amorphous blight of nethermost, nuclear confusion from which all
infinity radiates; of Yog-Sothoth, 'the all-in-one and one-in-all', coexistent
with all time and conterminous in all space; of Nyarlathotep the Messenger; of
Great Cthulhu, 'dweller in the Depths' in his House at R'lyeh; of Hastur the
Unspeakable, a prime elemental of interstellar space and air, half-brother to
Cthulhu; and of Shub-Niggurath, 'the black goat of the woods with a thousand
young', fertility symbol in the cycle.
There were, too, other creatures and beings - such as Dagon, fish-god of the
Philistines and Phoenicians, ruler over the Deep Ones, ally and servant to
Cthulhu; the Tind'losi Hounds; Yibb-Tstll, Nyogtha, and Tsathoggua; Lloigor,
Zhar, and Ithaqua; Shudde-M'ell, Glaaki, and Daoloth - many, many of them. Of
some of these beings much was made in the mythos, and they were given ample
space in the books. Others were more obscure, rarely mentioned, and then only
in a vague and indecisive manner.
Basically the legend was this: that in an epoch so remote