The Doom That Came to Sarnath, Page 5
Sorry for the wait — here’s the new page of “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”! I spent the past three weeks in Jordan, where I spent part of the time visiting actual ancient ruins — Petra, Jerash, Madaba (where there is a fascinating mosaic map of the Near East in the Byzantine-Roman era) and other places. Of course, there is less water thereabouts than we see in “The Doom That Came to Sarnath.” I did visit the Dead Sea, however, which impressed me massively with its sense of isolation and strangeness, this deep hole in the Earth (it’s really far below sea level) filled with this poisonous saltpan. The Dead Sea is fed by the River Jordan, which, sadly, has become a mere trickle thanks to being drained for irrigation; on another trip I visited the Baptism Site and was disappointed to find that the river is scarcely ten feet wide and reduced to a stream of mud which flows through just one course of a former maze of now-dry islands covered with dead trees and bulrushes.
But of course, none of that has anything to do with SARNATH!!! I’m back in the US now and will continue drawing pages week by week ’till the end of the story! Next week’s is a big one so I may have to put the page up towards the end of the week instead of on Tuesday. But it’ll go up. After Sarnath is done, I hope to start a major new Lovecraftian project on this site. Thanks for all your patience and support!
Cool trip. I just read an article on Petra’s sister-city, Hegra, in an old Archaeology magazine; actually seeing those facades up close would be great.
Did you use cuneiform as the inspiration for the sign of doom?
Love that last panel. Reminds me a bit of the scene from Monty Python’s “Holy Grail”, where Joseph of Arimathea’s last words are scrawled in the cave… “Arrrggghhh”!
The Idol of Bokrug would make a great limited-edition statuette.
The sign of DOOM was definitely cuneiform-influenced, although I had something very specific in mind for it.
Befor the Python film there was Jonny Quest, the last episode called “Sea Haunt” about what looks like a Deep One on a ship nearly deserted. The Captains log ends because when he was writing it he was killed! Of course before that there was a Lovecraft ghost written of a story I like very much called “The Diary of Alonzo Typer.” In it on the last page he is in the grip of the horror and still writing madly as he is dragged away!
Further examples of narrators who continue to write right up to the bitter end occur in Robert Bloch’s “Notebook found in a Deserted House” and William Hope Hodgson’s “The House on the Borderland”. Even J. R. R. Tolkien used this device in “The Fellowship of The Ring”.
Of course, it’s never wise to pause and actually read the interrupted narrative until you’re a safe distance away from the place where you discovered it. Gandalf should really have known better!
If I remember correctly, an updated version of this hoary old device occurs in the sea-monster flick “Leviathan”. Here, it’s a videotape being recorded by the doomed ship’s captain. (The tape ends when the door behind the captain slowly begins to swing open).
And it’s interesting that Lovecraft nearly pulled off the same literary feat, jotting down notes during his last, fatal hours…..a writer till the end.
for some reason, the first time i read this story the impression i got was that the idol of Bokrug vanished because it wasn’t an idol, but rather bokrug itself.
later readings, after i’d learned a bit about Norse idol traditions i started to think maybe it was an idol, but like the Norse believed, the idol became animate whenever Bokrug inhabited it. which i guess works out to the same thing.
Interesting idea! I actually didn’t think of the idea of Bokrug coming to life until right before I drew this page… although I always pictured him/it just sneaking off for unknown purposes, not actually growing to Godzilla-size and destroying the city him/itself. I like the thought that Bokrug inhabited the idol, though the idea that idol=god is also appealing.