VII

though their main centers were transferred to the nearest sea bottom.

Later maps, which display this land mass as cracking and drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly.

With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific, tremendous events began. Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that was not the worst misfortune. Another race⁠—a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous prehuman spawn of Cthulhu⁠—soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea⁠—a colossal blow in view of the increasing land settlements.

Later, peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands. New land cities were founded⁠—the greatest of them in the Antarctic, for this region of first arrival was sacred.

From then on, as before, the Antarctic remained the center of the Old Ones’ civilization, and all the cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn were blotted out.

Then, suddenly, the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them the frightful stone city of R’lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet, except for one shadowy fear about which they did not like to speak.

At a rather later age their cities dotted all the land and water areas of the globe⁠—hence the recommendation in my coming monograph that some archaeologist make systematic borings with Pabodie’s type of apparatus in certain widely separated regions.