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[17 October: 1893]

Such grim musings as have been occupying my mind of late unfortunately seem

to suggest a possible link to the fate of my learned friend and colleague

Doctor Ignatius Stone. That brilliant researcher was last seen in command

of all his faculties whilst on an expedition to the ruins of the Sumerian

city of Ur, an undertaking which preceded my own work there by some eighteen

months. Stone was a gifted archaeologist who also dabbled, perhaps unwisely,

in certain areas of the occult, particularly involving the various

grotesqueries once worshipped as Cthonic deities by the ancient denizens of Ur.

Mere days before he ventured into the ziggurats of that foreboding,

mystery-haunted site, he had dispatched a letter to me claiming that he was

on the verge of a truly staggering arcane discovery at Ur which would

simultaneously prove the cyclical nature of human civilisation as well as

immediately render redundant all previous theories on the origin of man.

Whatever misfortune befell him within those aeons-old tombs robbed him

irrevocably of his sanity, for when his attendants finally managed to prise

open the stone door of the vast central catacomb, which had, I'm told,

inexplicably shut fast behind his three-man torch-bearing party, they found

two of the regularly stalwart men had seemingly expired of pure fright,

while Stone was slumped against the north wall, staring vacantly into the

gloom, gibbering about visitations by beings so terrible that the very

contemplation of their existence would sunder a man's tenuous hold on the

reins of sanity.

When I later visited him at the sanatorium in England, I found him to be a

tragic shell of the man I once knew, a man beset by imagined terrors and

ever wary of the immemo