The volume before you is bound into a number of other notes which appear to have accumulated over decades of research. As a whole, the paper and its binding appear to be in excellent condition, far better preserved than any other book this old.

The notes reveal that the original translation was made in about 950 by a Greek scholar, Theodorus Philetas who died shortly afterwards. The original was never found, but the translation was removed from his library by the church some fifteen years later after his son and only heir was involved in a tragic accident in which he accidentally brutally stabbed himself with his own sword. The church then kept it under lock and key for approximately eighty years, until rumours started spreading that the basement in which it was kept was home to unnatural terrors.

The Patriarch Michael Cerularius ordered the book burned in around 1050 or so - pages were ripped out and then what remained was tossed onto a fire. Miraculously it seemed to have an unnatural resistance to the flames and whilst a significant chunk of content is missing it was saved by an enterprising priest who squirrelled it away into his personal collection, where it survived until it was acquired by the order.

The original, the Kitab al-Azif, is probably no longer in Constantinople, as lengthy searches for information have turned up nothing so far. Most likely it was removed back to the Levant some time ago with the trading contacts that brought it to Philetas in the first place - it could reside in the libraries of an Arab noble or merchant, or it could have been traded away since. Details of the Philetas himself are hard to come by, but tax records may still exist in Byzantine vaults somewhere.

The text as a whole is written in Liturgical, or High, Greek. The line breaks and ellipses denote where the text is ripped, damaged, or burnt and impossible to read.

Being the Account of the Dread and Sinister Horrors that lie Beyond as translated from the original Texts of the Kitab al-Azif composed by Abdul Alhazred known as The Mad Arab by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople. May God forever grant Sanctuary against the Damnation that Lies within these pages.

I, Abdul Al-Hazred, say this to you. The Elder Gods have put the damned to sleep, and they that tamper with the seals and wake the sleepers, too, are damned. And I say further, herein lies the knowledge to break the seals that hold in thrall Xzoros and his ebon horde. For I Have spent my life to learn it all. So, fool, the darkness is pent up in space. The gates to Hell are closed. You Meddle at your own expense. When you call They will wake and answer you. This is my gift to mankind - here are the keys. Find your own locks; be glad. I, Abdul Al-Hazred say this to you - I, who tampered, and am mad.

The Image of the Law of the Dead abounds deep within me now, burned into my memory like some searing iron brand thrust into my eyes and my heart. For that knowledge granted me that Man was surely not meant to know can never be erased from my mind and its stain shall taint my soul until I die. I shall discourse upon these things in the hope that those curiouser than I will face the abyss with the Dire Warning upon these pages and foreknowledge of the great devouring horror Beyond and turn their backs upon it. The all-seeing, all-present eye of Djehuty forever hold me in its unblinking gaze and spare the souls of others.

The wolves carry a name in their midnight speeches, and that quiet, subtle Voice is summoning me from afar. And a voice much closer will shout into my ear with unholy impatience. I fear that such knowledge as I have will be lost as I float on towards that dread place and therefore I place it in the hands of the reader, may you with wisdom take this counsel.

It is thus that these blasphemies are laid out before men as food is before ravening animals, and men are ever as hungry for them. The Power sought by mankind is as inevitable as it is…

…harm to those of Earth, and fear only that shape which a certain sound may form in their universe. And these are nothing, a mere drop from an ocean of hideousness and unformed creatures alien to this place, still too are they Without and incomparable to those Within which are maddening in themselves.

For Many and Multiform are the dim horrors of Earth, infesting her ways from the prime. They sleep beneath the unturned stone; they rise from the tree with its root; they move beneath the sea and in subterranean places; they dwell in the inmost adyta; they emerge betimes from the shutten sepulchre of haughty bronze and the low grave that is sealed with clay. There be some that are long known to man, and others as yet unknown that abide the terrible latter days of their revealing. Those which are the most dreadful and the loathliest of all are happily still to be declared. But among those that have revealed themselves aforetime and have made manifest their veritable presence, there is one which may not openly be named for its exceeding foulness. It is that spawn which the hidden dweller in the World Vaults has begotten upon mortality.

Men know him as the Dweller in Darkness, that brother of the Old Ones called Enki, the Thing that should not be. He can be summoned to Earth's surface through certain secret caverns and fissures, and sorcerers have seen him in Syria and below the black tower of Leng: from the Thang Grotto of Tartary he has come ravening to bring terror and destruction among the pavilions of the Khan of Khans and all those who thereafter shall hold that title. Only by the looped cross, by the Vach-Viraj incantation, and by the Tikkoun elixir may he be driven back to the nighted caverns of hidden foulness where he dwelleth with his unholy spawn.

And thusly is the incantation of Vach-Viraj spoken:
Ya na kadishtu nilgh'ri stell'bsna Nyogtha,…

It was done then as it had been promised aforetime, that He was taken by Those Whom He Defied, and thrust into the Nethermost Deeps under the Sea, and placed within the barnacled Tower that is said to rise amidst the great ruin that is the Sunken City of Muu, and sealed within by the Elder Sign, and, raging at Those who had imprisoned Him, He further incurred Their anger, and they, descending upon him for the second time, did impose upon Him the semblance of Death, but left Him dreaming in that place under the great waters, and returned to that place from whence they had come, which is among the stars, and looketh upon Earth from the time when the leaves fall to that time when the ploughman becomes habited once again to his fields. And there shall He lie dreaming forever, in His House at Muu, toward which at once all His minions swam and strove against all manner of obstacles, and arranged themselves to wait for His awakening powerless to touch the Elder Sign and fearful of its great power knowing that the Cycle returneth, and He shall be freed to embrace the Earth again and make of it His Kingdom and defy the Elder Gods anew. And to His brothers it happened likewise, that They were taken by Those Whom They Defied and hurled into banishment, Him Who Is Not to Be Named being sent to the Outermost, beyond the Stars and with the others likewise, until the Earth was free of Them, and Those Who Came in the shape of Towers of Fire, returned whence They had come, and were seen no more, and on all Earth then peace came was unbroken while Their minions gathered and sought means and ways with which to free the Old Ones, and waited while man came to pry into secret, forbidden places and open the gate.

And it is the Ebon Loxodon, that cruel servant of Xzoros which takes the form of a colossal beast liken to those from the darkest jungles of the Africas and which waits in the shadows until its rage bursts forth and destroys in a fit of fiery malice, that is to be seen amongst the lands in the half-dreams of guards and the innocent perceptiveness of children and the corners of sight for those that it tracks. Its roar is akin to that of a dragon; no man has heard it and lived without worry and unhappiness for the rest of his days. This is one of the servants that have been sent before the gate whilst their masters congregate behind it in their unbidden masses and cry their hate ever as instructions to these avatars of madness.

Concerning the Old Ones, it is written that they wait ever at the Gate, and the Gate is all places and all times, for They know nothing of time or place but are in all time and in all place together without appearing to be, and there are those amongst Them which can assume diverse shapes and Features and any Given Shape and any given Face and the Gates are for Them everywhere, but the first was that which I caused to be opened. Namely, in Irem, the City of Pillars, the city under the desert, but wherever men set up the Stones, throw out the elements from that place, and sayeth thrice the forbidden Words, they shall cause there a Gate to be established and shall wait upon Them Who Come through the gate,…

…today, and there wait till there shall come again the winds and the Voices which drove Them forth before and That which Walketh on the Winds over the Earth and in the spaces that are among the Stars Forever.

Then shall They return and on this great Returning shall the Great Xzoros be freed from Muu beneath the Sea and Him Who Is Not to Be Named shall come from His City which is Carcosa near the Lake of Hali, and Gura shall come forth and multiply in her Hideousness, and Enki shall carry the word to all the Great Old Ones and their Minions, and Axios shall lay His Hand upon all that oppose Him and Destroy, and the blind idiot, the noxious One Within shall arise from the middle of the World where all is Chaos and Destruction where He has boiled and blasphemed at The centre which is of All Things, and Djehuty, who is the All-in-One and One-in-All, shall bring his…

And it was dreamed again of the priest Nophra-Ka and of the words he spake at his death, how the son would rise to claim the title, and the son would rule the world in his father’s name, and the son would revenge his father’s murder, and the son would call the Beast that is worshipped, and the sands would drink the blood of the seed of the Pharaoh. In this manner did Nophra-Ka prophecy.

The nethermost caverns are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed is the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

And while there are those who have dared to seek glimpses beyond the Veil, and to accept Him who is the One-In-All as a Guide, they would have been more prudent had they avoided commerce with Him; for it is written in the Book of Thoth how terrific is the price of a single glimpse. Nor may those who pass ever return, for in the Vastnesses transcending our world are Shapes of darkness that seize and bind. The Affair that shambleth about in the night, the Evil that defieth the Elder Sign, the Herd that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have, and that thrive on that which groweth out of the tenants within – all these Blacknesses are lesser than He Who guardeth the Gateway; He Who will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss of unnamable Devourers; He who is borne of the Gate-Master and the All-In-One. For He is Rani-los'a, the Most Ancient One, which the scribe rendereth as The Prolonged Of Life.

I saw there in the darkness beyond visions of madness and despair that I had hitherto felt only in dream - those haunting and violent visions that force themselves upon my consciousness and disturb and confuse the waking world with the sleeping - I saw the Black Tower, the great obsidian spire that split the skies in twain and was surrounded by discs of polychromatic fire that swung perilously about its too-high peak. I saw the terrible city of angles and regularity that chilled the mind in its crystalline structure as it advanced off beyond the euclidean and into the infinite, a fractal that is malevolent in its perfect regression. I saw the spawning grounds that brought forth the foul and many-bodied terrors that writhed in their half-formed agony and screamed for an end to their abominable existence, stinking in the effluent of their multitudinous rabble and crying for death or life over their halfborne suspension. I saw the unimaginable Cyclopean temples, green slime and mucous dripping from impossible angles as the icy stone rose, stepped, to impossible heights; imposing upon the vision, their vastness scarcely apparent amongst the colossal landscape. And it was in those damned places that the dominion of the Elder Ones held full sway, and from whence their madness imposed upon the world.

For the mightiest powers there can be no death and the hurled harpoons inflict, at most, surface injuries which heal quickly. I have said before and I shall say again until my tardily earned wisdom is accepted by my brethren as fact–in confronting that which has always been and always will be a master of magic can know only self-reproach and despair if he mistakes a temporary victory for one that he can never hope permanently to win.

Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Djehuty knows the gate. Djehuty is the gate. Djehuty is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Djehuty. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. …

Yet, even as stars wane and grow cold, even as stars die and the spaces between stars grow more wide, so wanes the power of all things - of the seven-faced star-stone - and there cometh a time as once was a time, when it shall be shown that:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

These Old Ones were instructed by the One Within, who is the blind, idiot god, and by Djehuty, who is the All-in-One and One-in-All, and upon whom are no strictures of time or space, and whose aspects on earth are Rani-los'a and the Ancient Ones. The Great Old Ones dream forever of that coming time when they shall once more rule Earth and all that Universe of which it is a part….

There are Ways in which the Mind of a man is like unto an Eye, in that it can be used as a Lens to focus the Powers that exist in the Spaces between the Worlds. Indeed, the Mind of any Man can be used, when severed from the confining ties of the Flesh and put into a state where he connects with the Ancient mysteries, as a Weapon of great Power. To the sorcerer who brings such an Essence under his Control, nothing is impossible, for he will be able to see into the farthest Lands of the World by means of that Mind's Eye, and shall be able to inflict upon his Enemies a Vengeance of such Type as will leave no slightest Mark, but shall cause them to expire with Fear and great Terrors. The Abyss can be turned upon them, opening its saturnine and baleful gaze upon them. This I have seen performed in dreams given me by that Master of Knowledge whose predictions never fail.

Na'ghimgor thdid lym.
Myn th'x barsoom lu'gndar.
In'path gix mth'nabor.
In'path nox vel'dekk.
Yig sudeth M'cylorum.
M'xxlit kraddath Soggoth im'betnk.
Nog s'dath blexmed.
Which is translated thusly - You will leave this spot, which spot denies the thought of your coming and going, and you will take, in the Name of the Nameless One, all your minions and their devices with you. And even the uttering of your name will be lost to this world until Time has eaten its Own Head.

…from the space which is not space, into any time when the Words are spoken, can the holder of the Knowledge summon The Black, blood of Iyllstbb, that which liveth apart from him and eateth souls, that which smothers and is called Drowner. Only in water can one escape the drowning; that which is in water drowneth not. He Waits Behind The Wall, in a palace of tortured glass, served by legions forged from the tears of the sleepless dead and clad in armour carved from the suffering of mothers. In his right hand he holds a dead star, and in his right hand he holds the Candle Whose Light Is Shadow. His left hands are stained with the blood of Am Dhaegar. The wall will fall and the gates will be no more, and He Will Come.

He who would be a Master of the Runes and possessor of Life eternal must consecrate to Djehuty on Lammas Night the Flesh of an infant newborn and eat thereof. Nor is the consecration to be made by those faint of heart or doubting in their souls, for Djehuty knows all, Djehuty sees all, Djehuty is all. Iä! Djehuty!

And it was prophesied also that the Formicae would render down the servants of the One Within and would destroy them, and that this process will begin when the moon falls dark for its whole cycle, and that their mass would travel into and through and between their link to the One Within and would sever them from him and thus bring down the false order.

It is verily known by few, but is nevertheless an attestable fact, that the will of a sorcerer hath power upon the body and can raise it up from the tomb and perform therewith whatever action was unfulfilled in life. And such resurrections are invariably for the doing of malevolent deeds and for the detriment of others. Most readily can the corpse be animated if all its members have remained intact; and yet there are cases in which the excelling will of the wizard hath reared up from death the sundered pieces of a body hewn in many fragments, and hath caused them to serve his end, either seperately or in a temporary reunion. But in every instance, after the action hath been completed, the body lapseth into its former state.

And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one. When it begins, you will hear the sound of …