SPHINX
"There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren—but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus without fear."
"The Great Sphinx! God!—that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before . . . what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror—the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw. . . ."
H.P. Lovecraft & Harry Houdini, Under the Pyramids
"The Great Sphinx! God!—that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before . . . what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror—the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged . . . that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus . . . the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw. . . ."
H.P. Lovecraft & Harry Houdini, Under the Pyramids
"Hell yes" just doesn't do it justice.
ReplyDeleteMore like "f@#k yeah"! Awesome depiction of the probably most faint-inducing monster in Lovecraft's fiction!
ReplyDelete"...the five-headed monster—and that of which it is the merest fore paw..."
ReplyDeleteSee, because it looks like a mangy cat with horns, and not, as in the quote in your own blog that's RIGHT THERE, a monster who's forepaws have five heads.
Normally you're spot on, but this is one of the flat out weirdest mistakes you've made. I don't understand why you did this...
Hey man, yeah it's a weird description but if you go back and check it Lovecraft is actually describing the paw of a giant Sphinx. He MISTAKES the toes for heads (in fact he goes into great detail about the size of the heads in comparison to one another ala "this little piggy"). The "rigid tentacles" that are projecting from each "head" is a claw. He mistook it for a 5 headed beast because of its sheer size. Here's the rest of the quote:
ReplyDelete"It seemed to have no neck, but five separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk; the first very small, the second good-sized, the third and fourth equal and largest of all, and the fifth rather small, though not so small as the first. Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the excessively great quantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture."
HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME
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