Call of Mimiteh

The older matters which had made the sculptor's vision and bas-relief so significant to my aunt formed the subject of the second half of her long unguscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Tongues had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Mimiteh”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connection that it is small wonder she pursued young Maquette with queries and demands for data.

This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the Equestrian Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St Lusitano. Professor Tongues, as befitted one of her authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations, and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.

The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged, earth-pony mare who had travelled all the way from New Oatleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. Her name was Green Grass, and she was by profession an inspector of police. With her she bore the subject of her visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin she was at a loss to determine.

It must not be fancied that Inspector Green Grass had the least interest in hippopology. On the contrary, her wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the Hayseed Swamps south of New Oatleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realize that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than anypony among them had suspected possible. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.

Inspector Green Grass was scarcely prepared for the sensation which her offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled mares of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around her to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognized school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and blueish surface of unplaceable stone.

The figure, which was finally passed slowly from mare to mare for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmareship. It represented a monster of vaguely equine outline, but with a wedge shaped head whose short muzzle bristled with sharp fangs, a slim, stretched body, long spindly legs, tendril-like hair, and wide membranous wings lined with feathers behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat emaciated gauntness, and curled evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the body of the thing lay curled on it’s side in the centre, whilst the long, curved hooves of the hind legs folded, spring-like beneath the bony flanks. The serpentine head was bent forward and and downward, so that the muzzle brushed the backs of slim fore-hooves which gripped the front edge of the block. The creeping tendrils of the mane fell forward toward the center of the body to cover the part of the shoulder and block. The tail similarly swirled and snaked it’s way around the left side of the block, obscuring some of the hieroglyphics. The aspect of the whole was abnormally lifelike, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it show with any known type of art belonging to civilization's youth — or indeed to any other time.

Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, blueish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world's expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from ponykind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.

And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the inspector's problem, there was one mare in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle she knew. This pony was the late Tangled Web, professor of hippopology in Percheron University, and an explorer of no slight note.

Professor Web had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of the Opal Coast and the Isle of Ice in search of some Runic inscriptions which she failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Opal Coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate pegasi whose religion, a curious form of demon-worship, chilled her with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other nearby tribes knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the earth was made. Besides nameless rites and equine sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder demon or sugnta; and of this Professor Web had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged shamare or wizard-priestess, expressing the sounds in the common alphabet as best she knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced and flew when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And as far as she could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.

These data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Green Grass; and she began at once to ply her informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers her mares had arrested, she besought the professor to remember as best she might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist pegasai. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the pegasai wizards and the Hayseed Swamp-priestesses had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this — the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase a s chanted aloud;

“Cu'atyhv ztyj'ansu Mimiteh E'ruylt jtnu'anty pguhyuh”

Green Grass had one point in advance of Professor Web, for several among his miserable prisoners had repeated to her what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:

“In her house at E'ruylt, dead Mimiteh lies dreaming.”

And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Green Grass related as fully as possible her experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my aunt attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such unlettered outcasts as might be least expected to possess it.

On 1 November 1907, there had come to New Oatleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The locals there, mostly uneducated but good-natured descendants of Lafillyette's mares, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their stallions and foals had disappeared since the malevolent drum had begun its incessant beating far within the dark haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing demon-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the ponies could stand it no more.

So a herd of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering local as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and after the sun set even the bright light of the full moon seemed distorted; so every pile of dank stones or fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet lit by the dappled, blue light combined to create. At length the settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers trotted out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of drums was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of moon-dappled forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed locals refused point-blank to advance another inch towards the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Green Grass and her nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into dim arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by civilized ponies. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless dark polypus thing with luminous eyes; and locals whispered that bat-winged demon-beasts flew down from above the highest clouds to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before New Oatleans, before the tribes of White-Tailed Deer or Buffalo, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made mares dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present depraved ceremony was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the locals more than the shocking sounds and or their missing kin.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Green Grass' mares as they ploughed on through the dim quagmire towards the red glare and the muffled drums. There are vocal qualities peculiar to mares, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to demoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those moon-lit woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululations would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of uneven voices would rise in singsong chant that hideous phrase or ritual:

“Cu'atyhv ztyj'ansu Mimiteh E'ruylt jtnu'anty pguhyuh”

Then the mares, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the worshippers fortunately deadened. Green Grass dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting mare, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotized with horror.

In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped, twisted, and flapped a more indescribable horde of equine abnormality than any but an artist the like of Catalyst or White Star could paint. Covered in obscene body-paint, this mottled herd were braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ring shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, heads downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless locals who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped, danced, flew, and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the mares, an excitable unicorn, to fancy she heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This mare, Hearts Trump, I later met and questioned; and she proved distractingly imaginative. She indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous dark bulk beyond the remotest trees — but I suppose she had been hearing too much local superstition.

Actually, the horrified pause of the mares was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mottled celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Green Grass was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom she forced to fall into line between two rows of policemares. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Green Grass.

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners proved to be mares of many sorts. A few were weather workers, while a majority of those who performed the lowest of grunt work on airships filled out the group. Two griffons and a doe, gave a colouring of exoticism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than simple fetishism was involved. Poor and ignorant as they were, the ponies held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before the first mare, and who came to the world out of the sky. These Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and in the sky; but they would return. This cult, the prisoners said, had always existed and always would exist, until the time when the great priest Mimiteh, from her shining house in the mighty city of E'ruylt beyond the void above the clouds, should descend and bring the world again beneath her sway. Some day she would call, when the stars were ready to aid her, and the cult would always be waiting to liberate her.

When they were questioned about the idol all agreed that no pony living could read the old writing on it now, but they all knew it to be the form of the great Mimiteh, though no pony had ever seen her. Likewise the ritual they had chanted was not a secret. The chant meant only this: “In her house at E'ruylt, dead Mimiteh lies dreaming.”

Two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black-winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract came mainly from an immensely aged griffon named Castle, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the cloud temples of Trotbet.

Old Castle remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made mares and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth and moon, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, she said the deathless Trotbet-mare had told her, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones high in the remote mountains. They all died vast epochs of time before mares came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

These Great Old Ones, Castle continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image of the great Mimiteh prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of E'ruylt, preserved by the spells of mighty Mimiteh for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the world might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first mares came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshy minds of mammals.

Then, whispered Castle, those first mares formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras from distant stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again to aid her, and the secret priestesses would take great Mimiteh from Her tomb to revive Her subjects and resume Her rule of the world. The time would be easy to know, for then ponykind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and friendships thrown aside and all mares shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the world would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

In the elder time chosen mares had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The bright stone city of E'ruylt, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had risen above the clouds; and the void above the sky, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high priestesses said that the city would descend again when the stars were right. Then came out of the sky the dark spirits of highest reaches, quick and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in the whistling of the high thin winds on the edge of the void.

But of them old Castle dared not speak much. She said only that they were like ponies bred of Nightmares and cut herself off hurriedly. No amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, she curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, she said that she thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Saddle Arabia, where Aysel, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the Gryphonian witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Trotbet-mare said that there were double meanings in the Neighcronomicon of the mad Saddle Arabian Abdul Alhazrein which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

Green Grass, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castle, apparently, had told the truth when she said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at the University in New Oatleans could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Opal Coast tale of Professor Web.

The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Green Grass’ tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publication of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Green Grass for some time lent the image to Professor Web, but at the latter's death it was returned to her and remains in her possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Maquette.

That my aunt was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Green Grass had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young mare, who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Opal Coast demon tablet, but had come in her dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by pegasi diabolists and Hayseed Swamp worshipers? Professor Tongues' instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Maquette of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my aunt's expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the unguscript again and correlating the theosophical and hippopological notes with the cult narrative of Green Grass, I made a trip to Fillydelphia to see the sculptor and give her the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged mare.

Maquette still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Two Sisters Street, a hideous Whinnictorian imitation of seventeenth century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely Coltlonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Geldian steeple in Equestria. I found her at work in her rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that her genius is indeed profound and authentic. She will, I believe, be heard from some time as one of the great decadents; for she has crystallized in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Caashley evokes in cloth, and Purple Lemons makes visible in painting and in prose.

Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, she turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told her who I was, she displayed some interest; for my aunt had excited her curiosity in probing her strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge her knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw her out.

In a short time I became convinced of her absolute sincerity for she spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced her art profoundly, and she showed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its dark suggestion. She could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in her own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under her hooves. It was, no doubt, the bright shape she had raved of in delirium. That she really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my aunt's relentless catechism had let fall, she soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which she could possibly have received the weird impressions.

She talked of her dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the sandy Cyclopean city of shining white stone — whose geometry, she oddly said, was all wrong — and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Mimiteh pguhyuh, Mimiteh pguhyuh.”

These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Mimiteh's dream-vigil in her stone vault at E'ruylt, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Maquette, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of her equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that her imposture upon my aunt had been a very innocent one. The filly was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both her genius and her honesty. I took leave of her amicably, and wish her all the success her talent promises.

The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connections. I visited New Oatleans, talked with Green Grass and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mottled prisoners as still survived. Old Castle, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first hoof, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my aunt had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an hippopologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism as I wish it still were, and I discounted with a most inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Tongues.

One thing which I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my aunt's death was far from natural. She fell on a narrow hill street leading up from ancient landing yards swarming with ponies whose whole life is spent in the sky, after a careless push from a silent skymare. I did not forget the aeronautical pursuits of the cult-members in the Hayseed Swamps, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Green Grass and her mares, it is true, have been let alone; but in Neighrway a certain skymare who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my aunt after encountering the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Tongues died because she knew too much, or because she was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as she did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.