Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . .
I will tell the audient void. . . .

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general
tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding
apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger
as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people
went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared
consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was
upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver
in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the
autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had
passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could
tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when
they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven
centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of
civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments
of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of
electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away
speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see
Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours
were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such
a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours,
that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered
on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.

I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city—the great, the old, the
terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination
and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries.
My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; that what
was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy,
and that in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken
before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep
looked on sights which others saw not.

It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds
to see Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room.
And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces peering from
behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against blackness; against the waves of
destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, cooling
sun. Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up
on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads. And
when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about
“imposture” and “static electricity”, Nyarlathotep drave us all out,
down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I
was
not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace.
We sware to one another that the city
was exactly the same, and still alive; and when
the electric lights began to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at
the queer faces we made.

I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we
began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary formations and seemed to know
our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found
the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where the
tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on
its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river,
and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top. Then we split up
into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in
a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked
subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open
country, and presently felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on
the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable
snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering
walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind,
for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations
of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned
by those who had gone before, I half floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid,
into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.

Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A
sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly
midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds
that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous
things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space
and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting
graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine
of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding
and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate
gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.