The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate

all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,

and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction,

have hitherto harmed us little, but someday

the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality

and of our frightful position therein that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from

the deadly light into the peace and safety of a dark new age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle,

wherein our world and human race form transient incidents.

They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood,

if not masked by a blind optimism.

But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aons which chills me

when I think of it, and maddens me when I dream of it.

That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental

piecing together of separated things, in this case an old newspaper item in the notes of a dead professor.

I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out.

Certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link and so hideous a chain.

I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew,

and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926 to 1927,

with the death of my grand uncle George Gamal Angel,

Professor Emeritus of Semitic languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

...