DWA03

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

Here lies 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.

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

An immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief is before you. It is like a great barn-door, and yet you cannot decide whether it lays flat like a trap door or slant-wise like an outside door for a cellar. Suddenly it isn't clear whether the sea and the ground are horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seems fantasmally variable. Perhaps the door has a concealed trip mechanism?

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.