| Such grim musings as have been occupying my mind of late unfortunately seem
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| To suggest a possible link to the fate of my learned friend and colleague
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| Doctor Ignatius Stone. |
| That brilliant researcher was last seen in command
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| Of all his faculties whilst on an expedition to the ruins of the Sumerian
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| City of Ur, an undertaking which preceded my own work there by some eighteen
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| Months. |
| Stone was a gifted archaeologist who also dabbled, perhaps unwisely
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| In certain areas of the occult, particularly involving the various
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| Grotesqueries once worshipped as Cthonic deities by the ancient denizens of Ur
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| Mere days before he ventured into the ziggurats of that foreboding
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| Mystery-haunted site, he had dispatched a letter to me claiming that he was
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| On the verge of a truly staggering arcane discovery at Ur which would
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| Simultaneously prove the cyclical nature of human civilisation as well as
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| Immediately render redundant all previous theories on the origin of man
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| Whatever misfortune befell him within those aeons-old tombs robbed him
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| Irrevocably of his sanity, for when his attendants finally managed to prise
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| Open the stone door of the vast central catacomb, which had, I’m told
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| Inexplicably shut fast behind his three-man torch-bearing party, they found
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| Two of the regularly stalwart men had seemingly expired of pure fright
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| While Stone was slumped against the north wall, staring vacantly into the
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| Gloom, gibbering about visitations by beings so terrible that the very
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| Contemplation of their existence would sunder a man’s tenuous hold on the
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| Reins of sanity
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| When I later visited him at the sanatorium in England, I found him to be a
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| Tragic shell of the man I once knew, a man beset by imagined terrors and
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| Ever wary of the immemorial horrors which he claimed lurked at the periphery
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| Of humanity’s perceptions. |
| Indeed, I was glad I had taken a journal into
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| Which I could transcribe his delusional rants, for he had a great deal to
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| Tell me about The Dreamer In The Catacombs Of Ur: |