From the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales, “Ubbo-Sathla” is (on the surface, at least), Smith making his own contribution to the “Cthulhu Mythos”. An antiquarian named Paul Tregardis is loitering in a London curio shop, where he finds something interesting amid the fossil eggs, Aztec idols, ornate daggers and old black and white copies of National Geographic. This is a small crystal orb, slightly flattened at the ends, which seems to contain a pulsing light within it. The stone reportedly was found in Greenland under the glacial ice. The shopkeeper thinks it might have belonged to “some sorcerer of primeval Thule. Greenland was a warm, fertile region beneath the sun of Miocene times.” Buying the crystal and hurrying home, Tregardis shows us that he is no mere dilettante but a serious student of Forbidden Knowledge. He gets out his own copy of The Book of Eibon, which he obtained with great difficulty. This is the medieval French translation of a work “which is supposed to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea.” The Book of Eibon is thus much much older and more blasphemous and mind-blowing than even the Necronomicon itself. Tregardis takes to gazing into the gem, drifting back in spirit through the ages until he becomes one with the wizard Zon Mezzamalech. Tregardis finds it increasingly harder to snap out of the reveries and get back to 1933 London in time for tea, and eventually he yields altogether. Actually, the same thing is happening to Zon Mezzamalech too; twenty million years earlier, he is fading back to delve into the very source of all living things, Ubbo-Sathla. “There, in the gray beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life.”
Description From the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales, “Ubbo-Sathla” is (on the surface, at least), Smith making his own contribution to the “Cthulhu Mythos”. An antiquarian named Paul Tregardis is loitering in a London curio shop, where he finds something interesting amid the fossil eggs, Aztec idols, ornate daggers and old black and white copies of National Geographic. This is a small crystal orb, slightly flattened at the ends, which seems to contain a pulsing light within it. The stone reportedly was found in Greenland under the glacial ice. The shopkeeper thinks it might have belonged to “some sorcerer of primeval Thule. Greenland was a warm, fertile region beneath the sun of Miocene times.” Buying the crystal and hurrying home, Tregardis shows us that he is no mere dilettante but a serious student of Forbidden Knowledge. He gets out his own copy of The Book of Eibon, which he obtained with great difficulty. This is the medieval French translation of a work “which is supposed to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea.” The Book of Eibon is thus much much older and more blasphemous and mind-blowing than even the Necronomicon itself. Tregardis takes to gazing into the gem, drifting back in spirit through the ages until he becomes one with the wizard Zon Mezzamalech. Tregardis finds it increasingly harder to snap out of the reveries and get back to 1933 London in time for tea, and eventually he yields altogether. Actually, the same thing is happening to Zon Mezzamalech too; twenty million years earlier, he is fading back to delve into the very source of all living things, Ubbo-Sathla. “There, in the gray beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life.”
