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I stood on the sand of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?” The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise authority for forty-two months. It opened its mouth to blaspheme God and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven. It was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them. And it was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast. Whoever has ears, let them hear: “If anyone is to go into captivity, into captivity they will go. If anyone is to be killed with the sword, with the sword they will be killed.” This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of God’s people.
The Green Man sings of the desert. Lowering his voice to a gaunt chant he evokes images of cities rising from the sterile desert, the desert as graveyard and someday resurrection. He promises a phoenix dawn. You must go to the desert, you must find the desert where you are, build the desert, heat and dry and burn to bring the desert. You must hack and chop and butcher and slaughter. You become the soul of the eternal city, you bring the image of the city floating in mid-air, the image wavering over the sterile desert.
The screen spans the wall evoking a desert, while the images from the screen and the fire in the minds of the viewers meld to bring holograms of desert towers, desert temples, skyscrapers, silos, desert armies, missiles, desert flames surging to the skies, hovering and wavering in mid-air projection of the inflamed brain.
The Green Man tells of the destroyers of the Earth, the great producers, the great bringers. They bring the sterile desert. And the massed people, the great consumers, unto the desert and then of the desert. They won’t be assimilated after death, but the great dessication they set in motion shall preserve their physical bodies, they shall live eternal mummies, the worshiped ancestors.
But only the elite destroyers, the great Leaders of the Desert will be worshiped, and the rest of your mummies will be tossed away as waste. But you shall be honored nameless as having perpetrated the great death and then destructed the great Necropolis.
This is the Green Man’s word on the climate in flames, climate searing and seared, charred and charring, driving the heat, driving the chaos, creeping always toward the dry, always toward the fire, always toward the desert.
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.
Then I saw a second beast come across the earth.
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.
He exercises all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and causes the earth and its inhabitants to worship the first beast whose fatal wound had been healed.
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 civilization 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.
He performs great signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to the earth in full view of the people. With these signs he is given power to perform on behalf of the first beast. He orders the inhabitants of the earth to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived.
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.
The Green Man has conjured the pantomimes of cultural and political motions. Before most of the people became aware of the crisis the chains had been slapped on and all possible motions were collapsed to one, always forward march toward an image of water and green shimmering amid the hazes. Those who could squint their burning eyes now and then enough to clear the haze were sure they saw infinite desert. But this caused no moment of doubt or reflection, for the haze and shimmer immediately would return. More, the image of desert did not repel, only further led them to stagger on. The image went deep because the infinite dead desert is the one and only true faith of the atoms of the mass. And if anyone could think for a moment that the green watery shimmer might be a mirage hovering over salted sands, this too only deepened the allure of the desert.
The Green Man projects images to be twirled by the priests of fire who dream fevers that will engineer the sky and sea on behalf of the beast, engineer the living flesh to fuel the furnace of the beast, inflame the holocaust to explode the beast’s voice into space where it sends men’s nightmares hurtling toward another planet to destroy. These beasts and their priesthood wear the robes of fire and heat as their emblem of the gods of desert aflame.
The second beast is given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refuse to worship the image to be killed. He forces all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they have the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.
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.
The masses sense the self-destruction of their onslaught. They know they can’t be sustained much longer. They sense the coming earthquake. Already they fancy they feel the surge. They feel the ground shake under their feet.
They desecrate their souls to redoubled commitment to the Extreme Energy civilization: Dominion promised by ancient faiths of Abraham, Dominion promised by the modern priests of fire who also still sacrifice at the ancient altar, Dominion of infinite Production as God, Dominion of infinite Consumption and Waste, Dominion of Destruction, Dominion of Mammon, Dominion of Progress, Long Live Death.
They fight through nightmares to believe everything happening is natural and sustainable. They desecrate their souls to rebuilding Sodom and Gomorrah the great cities of the salted desert, so the saturnalia of murder and destruction can continue. As the mythologist put it, they’ll continue “free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. The liberated Old Fires would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel in joy, and all the earth will flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”
Their mirage needs to reinforce the sands underlying it. They must believe in collective salvation and collective immolation as one goal. This Father and Son are joined by two-headed Dominion to complete the Trinity under the mushroom fire. Man vs. Nature, Nature as an enemy to be subjugated and exploited by Man, a woman to be raped by science, an automaton to be tortured, Gaia as the realm of Satan to be Reclaimed in preparation for the Rapture/Second Coming/Singularity, all these fundamentals preached by the priests of fire, all one sign of the crumbling existential confidence of the civilization, one castle built on the sterile sand it has strewn beneath itself.
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.
The people sit and watch the show, passively receive images to eyes, hologram sparklings come out and hover, all hi-tech and dazzling even as the screen shows all water dissolving, all green curdling to desert. Some march with older holograms of oil derricks in the desert, others with new-fangled ones depicting the world turned all to desert to be covered with metallic panels, to store the holocaust fires in one big battery.
This sterile desert is not the natural living flowering desert. It’s the desert of salt, of wasteland, the desert city of death.
I stood on the sand and looked at the phantom sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority. One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?” The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise authority for forty-two months. It opened its mouth to blaspheme God and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven. It was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them. And it was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast — all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world. Whoever has ears, let them hear.
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.
The masses plumb ever greater depths of existential fear, the Leaders present false images of these crises. The Leaders also fear and reassure themselves with fake democracy and redoubled war. So the masses need misdirection to reinforce the image direction of desert and shimmer.
And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about “imposture” and “static electricity”, Nyarlathotep drove 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 swore 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.
“If anyone is to go into captivity, into captivity they will go. If anyone is to be killed with the sword, with the sword they will be killed.”
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 ashen 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 projected stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things like Dominion gods; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to the dizzy vacuum above the spheres of light and darkness, the images everywhere but Earth. 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 created by the psychotic berserking souls of orcs — the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.