DWA03

Deeper and deeper, you are pushed beyond the edge of sanity, losing yourself to the smells of slime, sulphur and seasalt. You recover gradually, yet are shocked awake by a scream: "Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!"

You see a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror - the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the stars.

You awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks and the dizzying height of the great carven monolith. The geometry of this dream-place is all wrong, non-Euclidean, and poignantly redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.

You see an immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It is like a great barn-door, you cannot decide whether it lays flat like a trap door or slant-wise like an outside cellar door. You cannot be sure that the sea and the ground are horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seems fantasmally variable.

You wonder, discovering the door's hidden mechanism, how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel begins to give inward at the top. You watch the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this fantasy of prismatic distortion it moves anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seem upset. You may enter hesitantly as the great door closes behind you.