There is a mode whereby mortal Life may be preserved unto infinite Time, and the mages of the Past knew it as the Formula of Nnh; but very dangerous is this Formula of Nnh and the failure to utter aloud a single vocable according to the proper way may end in an horrible and unmentionable Doom, wherefor do I deem it exceeding rash and imprudent of the sorcerer who attempteth it.

#

And we rose up and departed out of shunned and legended Irem, those of us who had looked upon the very Face of Yog-Sothoth; and I sent my disciples ahead to procure suitable lodgings for us in the great metropolis of Alexandria, whilst I journeyed on to a certain Nameless City where for some time I abode among the denizens thereof and to which I determined at another time to return.

Now in this great city of Alexandria had my followers found an old house in that quarter which lieth beneath the shadow of the Black Mosque, for by that name do the Alexandrians becall the edifice, which is of frightful and unguessable antiquity, and whose precincts are shunned and avoided by wholesome men. This house which my disciples had procured for our dwelling-place was eminently suitable to my purposes, albeit that I did not enjoy our proximity to the Mosque, whose ebon spires soared aloft like the black tapers lit by necromancers in their abhorrent rites.

And there came to my door a deputation of the Faithful of that city to beg the assistance of my wisdom, for know that the reputation of Alhazred as a wizard had waxed mightily in the years since first I sat at the feet of my mentor, Yakthoob, the Saracen. These personages I received with every honor and hearkened to their plea, which was that the Black Mosque might be cleansed of the Evil Presence that inhabited it. While it had been years agone since last were the ritual prayers of the Faith performed in that awful place, still were fearful rumours whispered thereof: how it was that cruel and mocking laughter echoed to drown out the most solemn ceremonies of the Prophet; and that the sweet smokes of incense, under some malignant spell, were wont to turn to foul and foetid stenchfulness; and how even the sacrosanct pages of the Holy Alcoran were found besmirched with vile filth and bescribbled with loathsome obscenities.

On the day following upon this, I eloigned with my disciples to the sealed Mosque, whose portals were reluctantly unlocked by the trembling hands of the most venerable of the Imams. Within, all was neglect and decay, and the dust of very many years overlay every surface. Torches were struck to fire, and by their source of luminance I at length perceived that my apprehension as to the antiquity of the Mosque had been accurate: far more ancient was this gloom-enshrouded edifice than even the very Faith of the Prophet. Once, ages before, had it been the fane of the Idolatrous Ancients, for it could be seen that many chisels had ruthlessly hewn away the images and hieroglyphics of the forgotten past, now over-painted with flaking and rotting plaster.

It might well prove, or so I reasoned in mine own heart, that when this temple of the Idol-worshippers had been purified by the Mussulmans and consecrated to the usage of their own Faith, that the rites of exorcism had been performed with undue haste or unwise carelessness, and that somewhat of the Power of the beast-headed Gods of ancient Aegypt lingered on to mock and confound the present worshippers herein.

Now it was well and fully known to me that the Idolaters of old were wont to dig certain secret crypts beneath the temples of their Abominations, and so we made search by torchlight for an entry to the adyts beneath the temple; and in the fullness of Time I came upon one place where the tiles upon the floor had crumbled with age and desuetude, revealing the outlines of a mighty slab of stone that once had served the priests of Aegypt in the manner of a trapdoor. There wast a great bronze ring sunken into the stone and much gnawed with vertigris but still sound, and there was amongst them who followed at my heels a youth of prodigious strength, aye, a veritable Rustum was he, whose great thews pried open the slab from out the stony floor. And we discovered then a flight of steps hewn from the very bedrock upon which had the City been reared, a flight of stone steps the which descended into the unbroken Darkness below. Now in sooth didst fear and trembling assail the valor of our hearts, for that the mephitic vapours of the Vault panted forth into our very nostrils, loathsome with the putrescence of the Pit Itself. Natheless must we descend into the depths, for having once taken up the burthen of the task we might not, on our Honour, avoid the Perils that might ensue. . . .

#

The Vault beneath the Mosque was Stygian in its gloom, and here even the light of our many torches did little to dispel the Dark; moreover the very air itself was vitiated and stale with the passage of long ages that had passed since that day when last was the great stony slab set to seal in the Secrets below, whereby did our flames burn but feebly.

Yet was their light enough for us to see with shudderings that small, squirming, pallid shapes squealed and scurried from the unwonted luminance; larger than any rats were these and almost did their repulsive lineaments bear the stamp of humankind, although of a stock long turned vicious and depraved, through what unspeakable Practices we could but conjecture. Deformed and dwarfish were these squeaking, timorous troglodytes, with weak small eyes, and hideously pink were these eyes, as even was the lank hair of these misshapen Creatures as pale as be the hair of albinos.

Through the gloom and the dreadful Stench of these Vaults did we make our slow and stumbling way, squeamishly avoiding, after one horrified glimpse, that upon which our feet trod: the gnawed small bones and corpses of rats, and of vipers, and, betimes, of the bones of stolen children. . . .

We came at length and in the fullness of Time to the discovery of That which the abominable dwarflings worshipped as had their ancestors for uncounted ages: it was an Idol in the likeness of a man, clad in the vestments of a priest of antique Aegypt, and so true to man's veritable eidolon was it that for a terrible moment we feared it lived and drew breath; but, nay, it was only a dead thing, hard as stone to the touch, and thick with the dust of aeons. Then it was that rash and imprudent curiosity bade me take up the hem of my garment to wipe away the dust from the features of the Idol so that I might discern their nature . . . and I cried out and let my torch fall from palsied hands, and we turned and fled back through that ghastly carpeting of gnawed little bones, and up the stone stair and back to the blessed light of Day, letting fall the stone slab upon the opening to those nether horrors, sealing them up forever, as we hoped.

#

And I did not for very long continue to abide in this dark quarter under the grim shadow of that accursed Mosque of Abominations, and, indeed, soon left the city of the Alexandrians to embark upon a long and difficult journey, never to return to the mighty metropolis where the Black Mosque stood ancient, unhallowed, and regrettably unburnt. For I had read in crumbling papyri of the awful Formula of Nnh, which no wizard recites save at his Peril and whereby may a man be frozen forever in one infinite moment of Time, and I knew the dreadful horror of the Thing the abominable dwellers beneath the Mosque worshipped in their degeneracy, and knew as well the terrible Secret thereof . . . the which had burst upon my horrified mind the instant I wiped the centuries of dust from those living, staring, mad and desperate eyes of the Idol beneath the Mosque.

The Notes;

1. In a letter to his friend Clark Ashton Smith, dated November 18, 1930, Lovecraft mentions the Fourth Narrative thusly: "some timid reader has torn out the pages where the Episode of the Vault under the Mosque comes to a climax --- the deletion being curiously uniform in the copies at Harvard & at Miskatonic University" (Selected Letters II, 218-19). The copies of the Necronomicon that I have checked at these two great institutions of learning (and also the copy preserved in the library of the Field Museum in Chicago, to which August Derleth called our attention in his story "The Evil Ones", Strange Stories, October 1940) bear an identical mutilation. However, the Dee Manuscript from which I have made this redaction is whole and unimpaired. The extirpation begins with the words "Yet was their light enough for us to see . . ."

2. Von Junzt and other commentators, including Laban Shrewsbury, have pointed out that the ten narratives of this first book of the Necronomicon seem written in imitation of the second portion of the Book of Eibon, which is called "Episodes of Eibon of Mhu Thulan." Therein, Eibon sets down what purport to be actual episodes from his own career as a sorcerer, precisely as Alhazred does in Necronomicon I, i-x. In both instances the episodes (or, in Alhazred, "narratives") seem to serve the purpose of precautionary fables or teaching parables, designed to warn the student away from some of the hazards of the sorcerous career.

3. It is probably significant that the concluding books of the Necronomicon, which are compilations of spells, formulae, recipes, pentacles, sigils, incantations, spells and the like, do not contain the Nnh Formula, which is conspicuous by its absence. In view of the gingerly and trepidatious manner in which Alhazred treats this Formula, however, his refusal to set it down seems excusable and quite understandable.