Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; Imprisoned with the Pharaohs

This was the last story in the Del Rey edition of The Doom That Came to Sarnath, and it was a surprising one.  There is a disclaimer on the first page that this story was written in conjunction with Harry Houdini, and what makes that so intriguing is that now we finally have a face for a narrator.

The story begins innocuously enough, with Houdini and his wife exploring Cairo, but progressively getting more and more bored with the watering down of the Egyptian culture in the tourism culture (this story takes place in 1910…it’s good to know that things don’t change).  They find a new guide, a man named Abdul Reis el Drogman, and immediately his moniker, and thus his plausibility is called into question. “Reis” is apparently a name for someone in power.  “Drogman” is apparently a “clumsy modification” of the name for the leader of the tourist parties “Dragoman”.  He also looks suspiciously like a Pharaoh (This in and of itself is suspicious.  How does one look like a Pharaoh?  This is just Lovecraft’s clumsy, whimsical, and adorable foreshadowing).

They go around town and go on a few adventures, then they make mention that they don’t trust magic.  That that has been cast down as evil.  So a group of Arabs tie Houdini up (presumably to see if he can escape) and throw him down into a tomb.

Thus far this has been the longest of the stories that I’ve gone through the blind read.  Throughout this story, nothing untoward had happened, and even when they throw him down the tomb, there are some strange happenings, but Houdini is in and out of consciousness, so there is a little call to unreliable narrator.  Then Lovecraft comes in full force, and we see more of the creatures that Lovecraft is so known for in the last few pages.  We also see one huge deity, of which we only see one single paw.

This goes along with the whole cannon of Lovecraft, I’m not sure exactly where this deity fits in yet, but it is a Cthonic creature, which follows with the established world.

This story also gives a certain credence to Lovecrafts mythos, because now it is the famous Harry Houdini who is experiencing the cosmic horror, even though the very last line, denies such experiences, by telling the audience that it was only a dream.  Oddly enough this is the one story that I truly believe the narrator experienced it, specifically because he presupposes that it was a dream.

Join me again next Tuesday as I start doing a Blind Read of The Lurking Fear, also by Del Rey.  We’ll jump right into the story “The Lurking Fear”