Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred (28 page)

The men of the plain were taught the making of the ziggurats by their most secret and most revered gods, who are a race of time spanners known to the Babylonians as the Watchers; it is the practice of this divine race to peer through time both into the past and future, searching out secret wisdom and building rays to carry them from one age to another. In their own tongue they call themselves the Great Race, and their world they call Yith. They are not native to our earthly sphere, but came here long ages ago in intangible form by means of a kind of soul flight across the stars and inhabited the bodies of the creatures they found, making those forms their own; for they are so ancient that the shape of their original bodies, if indeed they ever were bound to one flesh, has been forgotten even by the Yithians themselves.

Stories of the Watchers abound, making it an easy matter to draw them from the lips of the young priests in the wine shops, where they daily gather to whore and gamble, for there are no more profligate or lewd holy men in all the world than those who dwell between the great rivers. They will not speak of their gods while sober, but after they become drunk they boast of their power and of their own intimate communication with these strange beings. For the price of a few cups of wine they will gladly expound on their entire history, insofar as it is known to their religion.

The priests tell how the Great Race fled the destruction of their own world, though what cataclysm caused its end they have never revealed to those who worship them. In the primal mists of our past, their souls flew across vast deserts of space and took up habitation in the largest and strongest creatures then living upon our world that were compatible with their minds. The body of these beings is said to be like a cone having long arms with pincers that resemble those of the scorpion, and atop it is a small round head alongside a separate stalk from which extends a projecting mouth in form similar to the bell of a trumpet. They are seldom glimpsed by those who worship them, for the Yithians prefer still to travel time in a bodiless state and to assume the body of some convenient form of life when they arrive at their destination.

Long ago they came forward in time to the land of Babylonia and inhabited the bodies of men, who are remembered in the Hebrew creation text titled Bereshit as the sons of God; for even though this occurred in our distant past, it was a future time to the Yithians. They carried no physical tools or weapons with them across time, having not the power to move material things in this way without the aid of the ziggurats, but their wisdom was greater than that of any man, and eventually they came to rule the land, for the bodies of their hosts were rendered deathless by their presence. For their pleasure, and to fulfill their purposes in the age of mankind, they took in marriage the most beautiful of the women of noble birth and bred within their wombs daughters and sons, creating a new race that was outwardly in the shape of man but inwardly possessed a portion of the vast intelligence of their fathers.

The sons of the Watchers were mighty warriors, and long of years; they made war against the peoples of all the surrounding lands and forced them into subjugation under one king, who was the leader of the Watchers inhabiting our age; in numbers the Watchers were few, but their sons multiplied and became many. They applied their great minds to the wisdom of the Watchers, which was freely given to them. In this way they became masters not only of warfare but of metalworking and of the making of ornaments, and of the use of enchantments, and in the knowledge of the heavens. As their wisdom increased, so did their wickedness, and no equal is to be found to match their delight in depravity and abomination.

These matters are written of in the book of Enoch the prophet, who entered one of the rays of the ziggurats and was seen no more in the times of our history, or so teach the degenerate priests who still light fires atop these monuments and make gates to give offerings to the Watchers. Enoch wrote truly but he did not write all that he knew, and he did not know everything concerning the acts of the Yithians among man. He veiled his words in the conventions of his faith to make them less strange, and dared not write the true name of the Watchers, which is inscribed plainly here.

After the wealth and peoples of all the lands between the rivers were subjugated by the children of the Watchers and their generations, the construction of the ziggurats began. By their wisdom the Watchers selected the places of power and oversaw the building of the towers of stone and brick, and the fixing within their walls of the carven seals that were able to direct the force accumulated, when activated by the heat of fire. The primary purpose of the ziggurats is the transportation of material objects across time. Although it was within the ability of the Yithians to project their souls into the future and inhabit the bodies of men, it was not within their capacity to carry the things they coveted in our time back to their ancient age, or to bring their strange conical bodies forward to our time.

This the ziggurats allowed them to do, but only for brief periods of minutes, and only for the passage of a single being or a cargo of precious substances of the weight of a horse. Once used, a ziggurat must lie inert for years before its potential to project a ray of time is regained. These limitations greatly frustrated the Watchers, who desired free travel and transportation between their own time and our time. For this reason, they conceived a great ziggurat higher and broader than any that had yet been made, to the intent that it would possess so vast a force that its ray would shine through the years unceasingly, requiring no period of restoration, and make as it were an open doorway through time; but this ambition proved to be their downfall.

he story of the great ziggurat of eternity is related in the book of creation of the Hebrews, who received it from the Babylonians during their captivity after the fall of the First Temple, but it is not well told, and many things must be added to the tale before it may be understood by the wise. The Hebrews called it Babel, a word they took to signify many tongues, but in the language of Yith
babel
means the unending portal, for so the towering monument, larger than anything that has ever been made by the hands of man, was called by the Watchers.

The creatures of Yith are a patient race, as befits the masters of time. Over the span of several human generations they prepared the foundations of the tower, having by their arts located the place upon the land between the rivers possessed of the greatest conflux of subterranean forces converging there in mighty lines like the spokes of a wheel. More generations passed while they transported carven seals from their own distant time through the rays of lesser portals; they were made from a strange stone not to be quarried in the age of the Watchers, for the hills from which it came had long before sunk beneath the waves of the sea.

With great care the seals were inserted into the body of the ziggurat as its courses mounted ever upward to the clouds. As the seals multiplied in number, they drew power up from the earth, and the entire ziggurat began to glow with strange colors and to throb with a deep tone like the low chant of many voices.

The common workmen who laid the stones into their places began to look fearfully at one another, and some cast down their tools and refused to labor, but the arrogant descendents of the Watchers lashed them with whips and slayed with swords those who would not rise up from their bellies, so that by the fear they created in the hearts of their subjects, the terror of the strange colors and mighty drone was overcome, and the work was completed. On the night the portal of eternity was to be opened, all of the Watchers, who are said in the book of Enoch the prophet to have been two hundred in number, assembled on the mount of the ziggurat, and with them gathered their sons among men, and their descendents even to the tenth generation, for all wished to witness the wonder of the portal.

The colors shimmering upon the stones of the ziggurat were blinding, and the deep drone from within its body could be felt through sandals upon the soles of the feet, or so say the chronicles of the priests who adore at the lesser ziggurats in our own age. The king himself, who was the leader of the Watchers and of many years, set torch to kindling and lit the fire upon the altar. As was expected, a beam of white light ascended upward to the heavens, and where this beam arose from the flames, a portal through time was opened.

So great was the acclamation of the thousands gathered to view the event that few noticed the deeper rumble within the stones beneath them, or the flicker that began to dance along the ascending ray. As the rumble grew louder, the cries of voices dimmed and at last turned into a babble of uncertainty. Even the king, who stood nearest the altar, had difficulty keeping upon his feet, and finally was thrown to his hands and knees with an expression of astonishment. A great bolt of lightning, but many thousands of times larger than any lightning that the world had ever witnessed, struck downward along the ascending beam of light and cut its path into the center of the ziggurat through its stones, melting them with its heat. All were blinded and deafened, and many at the topmost tire of the structure were instantly cast off its sides to their deaths.

The rumble in the earth grew louder as the people fled down the stair that wound in a spiral around the four sloping sides of the tower, pushing those who blocked their path over the edges. At last the ziggurat was split as though by a sword of fire, and its stones fell in a thunderous cascade. All who remained in confusion upon its heights were killed, and most of those who occupied its intermediate levels. Only a few escaped death from the rain of stones, those who had fled the heights quickly and those on the lowermost level who were of the tenth generation of the children of the Watchers, whose blood was weakest and who had not merited the honor of a higher place upon the ziggurat.

The dawn revealed a smoking ruin of blackened stones and thousands of charred and naked corpses, the garments of which had burned away, lying scattered across the plain. The Watchers were no more; of their strongest children only a few lived, and within the span of a month all who had stood upon the ziggurat were dead, for the lightning that shattered the tower sent into the blood of everyone who stood upon its levels a kind of poison that took away their strength and caused their hair to fall from their heads. The governing of the land was cast into complete confusion, for no one remained to lead. Those peoples subjugated by the Watchers resumed their old customs and their languages, and returned to their ancient homes. So were the peoples of the plain scattered, and thus was their greatness lost. Where they had been one nation under the rule of the Watchers, they became many nations.

These things happened uncounted generations before the rise of Babylon, yet the fall of the great ziggurat is depicted upon one of the gold plates in the pillared hall beneath the sphinx. It shows the tower split by lightning, and two of the Watchers cast down from its heights. Only a man who has heard the story of the fall of Babel would comprehend its true meaning.