Lately, I have been showing the cryptic symbols which appeared in Professor Turner’s hand above the word Cthulhu around the University. The reaction I get is peculiar in the extreme. Most professors who see it’take it hi good humor as an unusual student prank. Those few who do not find it funny exhibit an odd trembling of the hands when they first set eyes upon it,
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WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE …
but cover up very quickly thereafter and pronounce the symbol an insulting hoax. They are quite forceful about this, and wish to have no more to do with it. I am much puzzled, as this seems to occur almost always with the older professors,
The first of the charts I copied shows the general area of the South Pacific. It has drawn in Easter Island, a rough duplication of Cook’s courses for his voyages of 1773-75, and a number of other notations and markings, most of which are unintelligible. Most peculiar of these is an “X” at approximately 167 degrees east longitude, and 77 degrees south latitude. Under these coordinates are the notes “Halley’s, ’86,” which doubtless refers to the next reappearance of the famous Halley comet, due back in our solar vicinity in 1986. A check of a National Geographic map of this area reveals that the above coordinates intersect on or very near Mt. Erebus, the 15,000-foot-high active volcano on McMurdo Sound in Anartica. What this has to do with the next appearance of Halley’s comet is no doubt known only to Professors Turner and Nolan.
The second sketch is simply a crude map of the world with two lines drawn in on it. Although laughable hi its simplicity, I was rather intrigued by this, as the two lines ran thusly: one went in a straight line from that “X” (Mt. Erebus?) to Easter Island. The other line runs from Easter, through the center “of its neighbor, Sala-y-Gomez, to a spot in the Andes of Northern Chile. This, again coincidentally, happens to be the area Professor Fernandez was exploring when he was killed by the earthquake. Straight as an arrow, it continues onward with three other “X’s” marked along its length. One is somewhere in the jungle of the Matto Grosso (memo: write the Brazilian Land Survey), another in the Brazilian Basin, the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, to end finally near Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia. i