# Investigation: Poe’s City in the Sea, Byron’s Darkness, and sunken cities in the mud flood > **TL;DR:** Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Doomed City” (1831), rewritten as “The City of Sin” (1836) and “The City in the Sea” (1845), and Lord Byron’s “Darkness” (Diodati, July 1816) are read here as records of a city that sank in the mud flood and of the long dark that followed on the places most targeted. The 1965 film *City Under the Sea* names the volcano. *The Shadow over Innsmouth* and *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever* carry the people who could breathe water, and the war between sea people and land people. **AU-079.** Hub: [Mud flood](/history/mudflood/page.md). Registry: [author-unique theories](/history/chronology/investigations/author-unique-theories.md). ## Status **Open.** The three Poe printings and the 1816 poem are on the page. The city is not named. The volcano is the author’s reading of the sea-light, confirmed as a plot fact only in the 1965 film. The sea-survivor reading and the science-fiction shelf reading are author claims beside a documented publication calendar. ## Guide 1. What Byron and Poe could have known, and what the poems show — [§1](#1-what-the-poets-could-know). 2. The author’s claims, registered as **AU-079** — [§2](#2-authors-originating-thesis) and [§3](#3-author-open-claims-au-079). 3. The 1831 pall, the 1836 cut, and the 1845 subtitle — [§4](#4-three-printings). 4. Byron’s long dark, the mountain-torch, and the years — [§5](#5-byrons-darkness-1816) and [§6](#6-timing). 5. Holy rays, the sea-light, and the film volcano — [§7](#7-sky-and-weapon) and [§8](#8-sea-light-the-film-and-the-sinking). 6. Innsmouth, the gill-men, Talokan, the books, and the science-fiction shelf — [§9](#9-innsmouth-the-gill-men-and-talokan) through [§12](#12-the-books-the-death-and-the-science-fiction-shelf). 7. Gills: the mutation account, and the open account that a sea people entered after the sinking — [§13](#13-gills). 8. What is still open — [§14](#14-questions-to-clarify-verify-or-debunk). Redaction codes used below are defined in [REDACTION.md](/docs/REDACTION.md). **R1** is a cut. **R3** is a rewrite that changes the cause. --- ## 1. What the poets could know Byron was born on 22 January 1788. Poe was born on 19 January 1809. Both dates fall after this repo’s mud-flood hinge, Pugachev in 1773, the Horde breakup in 1775, and the event at about 1774, as stated on the [mud-flood hub](/history/mudflood/page.md). Byron was 28 in July 1816, about 42 years after 1774. Poe was 22 when “The Doomed City” was printed in 1831, about 57 years after 1774. A person who was 20 in 1774 would have been about 77 when that book appeared. Neither poet saw the event. Witnesses and their children were still alive. **Author:** they were never told the cause. From their side they would not know that a named catastrophe had been declared, that another planet was involved, or that the other planet was hit. They wrote from the knowledge they had been given. The Mars weapon, the second planet, and the blowback are this dossier’s reading of what the lines preserve. They are not sentences the poets could have written as knowledge. What the poems are evidence of is a catastrophe people then knew as recent. Byron opens with “I had a dream, which was not all a dream.” Poe’s town is still settling: “Down, down that town shall settle hence.” Byron calls the dull sky “the pall of a past World,” and he attaches no year-count. **No thousand-year stasis.** Checked against the 1831, 1836, and 1845 Poe texts and the 1816 “Darkness.” Nobody says the city had remained unchanged for a thousand years. Poe’s “thousand” is “a thousand thrones” in 1831 and 1845, and “All Hades, from a thousand thrones” in 1836. That is the hell-light, read here as many vents, and it is not a duration. The age-words he does use are “Time-eaten towers,” “long-forgotten,” “eternal rest” for the dead, and, in 1831 only, “everlasting pall” for the sky. Byron gives no span of years at all. Lovecraft’s “ancient” undersea city is a later writer. It is not used here to age these poems. --- ## 2. Author’s originating thesis The investigation exists because the author read the poems, the film, and the later stories as one record. > Poe wrote “The City in the Sea” about a real city that sank in the mud flood. The timing lines up. “No rays from the holy heaven” is a weird denial. Who even asked the question? If that dark heaven was part of the original memory, the rewrite had to disconnect it. The poem was rewritten. Too much had got out. The narrative of the future would not include any kind of mud-flood memory. “Sin” changes a random catastrophe into God’s plan, an act of God, for anyone still feeling it. > > The holy rays are the Mars energetic weapon that started the event. The energy that took this city came from the ground, and from the ocean. *City Under the Sea* names the volcano. The plot is an impending doom with no solution and no reason given. A city above ground sank and became a volcano, or an underwater volcano. > > Byron’s “Darkness” is the long darkness that followed, on the places most targeted. When he says darkness “was the Universe,” he means the inner solar system catastrophe that destroyed two planets, mostly Mars, and spread debris all over. Endless rain and the lightless continent are the same places and the same event. Darkness lasted years. The rain was shorter and was not constant. > > Before the mud flood, volcanoes may have been the heat and energy of some cities. That use was more common than people now think. This investigation is only about sunken cities. > > Lovecraft’s *The Shadow over Innsmouth* is a post-mud-flood story. The humans who survived the sinking, the ones who could breathe underwater, did survive. The same survival is mirrored in many movies, including *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever*. There is a cultural and race war between mer-people and land people. > > His books were not published while he was alive, except this one. On 30 November 1936 he told Lee McBride White the book was a slovenly job, full of misprints, and that it woke no enthusiasm in him. He admits to being uninspired, dies, and other editors release the work. That is control by others, even if the motive is only greed. The timing of his death coincides with the creation of the science-fiction category. The Great Depression was raging. This is how culture is forced to change by an extreme few in charge. It demonstrates a multi-sensory power struggle between people trying to run governments on Earth and some entity attempting to remote-control those same governments by any means. Redacting known history into a science-fiction category covers the true reasons for the catastrophe and implies that the authority of those who caused it is eternal and unchallengeable, because that authority is constantly compared to the will and plan of God. Omitted remains the actual location and nature of these leaders or controllers. > > Because he came later, and because the books were not out while he was alive, his stories are the most whitewashed telling, the most science fiction and fantasy oriented. If the books had been published while he was alive, they may not have gone into science fiction, since that category did not exist yet as the shelf. He is one of the biggest obvious hinges of the switch. What he said inspired the stories lines up with an imposing influence from another planet, or, in his perspective, another dimension. His creature is the same host body as in H. G. Wells. > > The mud flood may be associated with mutation. The high-energy event may have set the conditions for rapid mutation and growth, so that people who drowned could come back to life underwater and form the organs they needed. **Unpack.** The poems are the near record. The film names a mechanism the poem only shows as light from the sea. Lovecraft is the late record, filed as fantasy after his death, during the Depression, under other editors. The God-comparison in Poe’s 1836 title and the “dimension” in Lovecraft’s essays are two ways the location and nature of the controllers drop out of the story a later reader is given. Cities that were already underwater before the mud flood are outside this file. The poem does not contain the word volcano and does not name the city. The reading still uses what is printed: light from a lurid sea, waves turning a redder glow, the town settling down, and hell rising from a thousand thrones. --- ## 3. Author open claims (AU-079) Prior art is partial. Sodom under the Dead Sea, Byron as a literary source for Poe, Tambora and the dark summer of 1816, Lyonesse as a Cornish legend, Innsmouth as race-horror, and Gernsback’s pulp word are all public. The package below is the author’s. 1. “The Doomed City” records a real city that sank in the mud flood, while witnesses and their children were still alive. 2. The 1831 pall stanza let a covered sky out. The 1836 cut and the title “The City of Sin” cover that leak: the future narrative drops the mud-flood memory, and anyone still feeling the event is given God’s plan. 3. “Holy rays from heaven” are the Mars weapon that started the wider event. The energy that took this city came out of the ground and the ocean. “A thousand thrones” is many vents. 4. Byron’s “Darkness” is the long dark after the flood, on the places most targeted. “She was the Universe” is the inner solar system. Two planets were destroyed, mostly Mars. The debris is the dark and the mud-rain. The second planet stays unnamed, because he did not name it. 5. “Always raining on that continent” and “light never shines on that continent” are the same places and the same event. Darkness lasted years. The rain lasted much less and was not constant. 6. Before the flood, volcanic heat and energy for cities were more common than the later industrial record. This file does not investigate cities that were already under the sea. 7. The 1965 plot comes from a real above-ground city that sank and became a volcano, or an underwater volcano. The doom has no cause and no cure on screen because the memory had none. The film date 1803 is a film date. 8. Innsmouth, the 1965 gill-men, and Talokan are three tellings of water-breathing people, and of the war between mer-people and land people. Whether those people are the drowned who changed, or a sea people who entered after, is [§13.2](#132-already-in-the-ocean). 9. The missing lifetime books, the uninspired letter of 30 November 1936, the death on 15 March 1937, and the 1939 collected book under other editors are control by others. Greed is enough as the editors’ motive. 10. Lovecraft is a main hinge of the science-fiction switch. Lifetime books might not have entered a shelf that was not yet the container. *Weird Tales* was the place the stories already had. Filing the history as science fiction covers the reasons for the catastrophe, compares the causers’ authority to the will and plan of God, and omits the location and nature of the controllers. 11. His inspiration statements describe an imposing influence from another planet. His word is dimension. Cthulhu is the same host body Wells describes. The Deep Ones stay the sea survivors. 12. **Speculative, not assumed:** the high-energy event was written as the mutagen that let drowned people grow gills. That account can be entirely wrong. Until a document says it happened, it is not assumed. The other account, in [§13.2](#132-already-in-the-ocean), is that gill humans already in the ocean entered the cities after the sinking and are not the original inhabitants. --- ## 4. Three printings Texts below are from the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. The 1831 book is [Text-02b](https://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/cityseaa.htm). The August 1836 *Southern Literary Messenger* text is [Text-03b](https://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/cityseab.htm). The 1845 *Broadway Journal* text is [Text-08](https://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/citysead.htm). Killis Campbell’s variorum, on the same site, records the titles and the lines that move: [Campbell](https://www.eapoe.org/works/campbell/kcp1728.htm). ### 4.1 1831 — “The Doomed City” *Poems*, pp. 49–51. Before the denial, the sky is still a picture. > A heaven that God doth not contemn > With stars is like a diadem — > We liken our ladies’ eyes to them — > But there! that everlasting pall! > It would be mockery to call > Such dreariness a heaven at all. > Yet tho' no holy rays come down > On the long night-time of that town, > Light from the lurid, deep sea > Streams up the turrets silently — The close is “Hell rising from a thousand thrones.” The town “shall settle hence.” Nobody in the scene asks whether holy light is coming down. The line answers a question the poem has not put. The “Yet tho'” grants the absence and then names the sea as the source. That is the craft hinge. It does not replace the leak reading in [§4.4](#44-author-on-the-rewrite). ### 4.2 1836 — “The City of Sin” *Southern Literary Messenger*, August 1836, signed “BY E. A. POE.” Poe was editing the magazine. A Boston *Atlas* review of that number, reprinted in the *National Banner and Nashville Whig* on 5 December 1836, already quotes the poem under the title “The City of Sin” and names him as the editor ([EAPOE copy of the review](https://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/18361200.htm)). The pall stanza is gone. Campbell prints the omission: after the line on Time-eaten towers, 1831 inserts the diadem, the everlasting pall, and “mockery to call / Such dreariness a heaven at all.” The 1836 text does not. The denial is now bare: > No holy rays from heaven come down > On the long night-time of that town, > But light from out the lurid sea > Streams up the turrets silently — The close is “All Hades, from a thousand thrones.” **R1-documented:** the pall stanza is in the 1831 book and absent from the 1836 magazine. **R3-documented:** the title changes from “The Doomed City,” a catastrophe with no cause named, to “The City of Sin,” a moral cause. ### 4.3 1845 — “The City in the Sea” *American Whig Review*, April 1845, then the *Broadway Journal*. Campbell’s title note: “The City in the Sea. A Prophecy (A. W. R.).” The subtitle places the poem in the future. The *Broadway Journal* text keeps the bare denial, now worded “No rays from the holy heaven come down,” the light from the lurid sea, “The waves have now a redder glow,” “Down, down that town shall settle hence,” and “Hell, rising from a thousand thrones.” The pall is still gone. A public-domain reading text is at [poets.org](https://poets.org/poem/city-sea). ### 4.4 Author on the rewrite The 1831 text let the catastrophe and the covered sky out. The later text covers that leak. A narrative meant for the future would not carry a mud-flood memory. “A Prophecy” does that placement on the page. For anyone still feeling the event, the cause becomes an act of God. “The City of Sin” does that change on the page. The [mud-flood hub](/history/mudflood/page.md) already says the Deep State chose not to reveal itself, knowing survivors would defer to the church’s conclusion that Pugachev’s defeat was a divine intervention by an angry creator. Poe’s name is on the 1836 page. The inference of pressure behind the rewrite is the author’s. Two ordinary reasons for the denial sit beside that reading. **Craft.** The negative hands the light to the sea. In 1831, “Yet tho'” answers an implied objection: if heaven sends nothing, what lights the town? **Byron, as Campbell’s source.** Killis Campbell, “Poe’s Indebtedness to Byron,” *Sewanee Review* 17 (1909), [EAPOE](https://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1900/kc190903.htm), pairs Poe’s line with “Darkness”: the sun extinguished, the stars rayless, and the dead, windless sea. Campbell’s quotation of Poe uses “came down.” The printings say “come down.” The borrowing is documented. “Darkness” is itself a mud-flood poem. The borrowing does not replace that. “Far down within the dim west” (1831 and 1836; “dim West” in 1845) is a candidate direction only. The hub already claims a carved Pacific basin and sunken cities on that floor ([MFEE](mfee-investigation.md)). The poem names no city. The film names Lyonesse, off Cornwall. That name stays the film’s, and it stays a candidate shell, the Cornish drowned-land legend. It is not assigned to the 1831 poem as a finding. --- ## 5. Byron’s “Darkness” (1816) Text: *The Prisoner of Chillon, and Other Poems* (1816), dated “Diodati, July, 1816.” The Coleridge and Prothero text is on [Wikisource](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_Lord_Byron_(ed._Coleridge,_Prothero)/Poetry/Volume_4/Darkness). A reading text is at [poets.org](https://poets.org/poem/darkness). The lines that sit beside the hub and beside Poe: - “I had a dream, which was not all a dream.” The speaker files the sky as a dream and then says the filing is incomplete. - “The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless,” and “Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day.” Heaven gives no light, and morning does not repair it. - “the dull sky, / The pall of a past World.” Poe’s 1831 “everlasting pall” is this phrase. The 1836 printing cuts it. The pall is already “of a past world,” so the poem dates the dark sky behind 1816. - “Happy were those who dwelt within the eye / Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch.” During the long dark, the cities that still had a volcano had heat and light from the ground. Cities and palaces burned for beacons are the places that did not have it. - “The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,” “The waves were dead,” “the clouds perish’d,” and “a chaos of hard clay.” - “The World was void, / The populous and the powerful was a lump, / Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless.” That ecological tail is the same wreck described in [blood rain](blood-rain-dust-ecological-disasters-investigation.md) and in the [slow-collapse sketch](/history/chronology/investigations/slow-ecological-collapse-mfee-through-donner-era.md). It is not a second thesis. **Author:** “Darkness” is the long darkness after the mud flood, on the places most targeted. It is not a one-night end of every city on Earth. The last lines are “Darkness had no need / Of aid from them—She was the Universe.” He used the word Universe. That word, on this reading, is the inner solar system. The catastrophe destroyed two planets, mostly Mars, and spread the debris everywhere. The debris is what keeps the targeted places dark. The mud-rain and the lightless sky are one event in those places. The darkness lasted years. The rain did not have to fall the whole time. He did not name the second planet. This file does not name it. The same “two planets” / Mars-destroyed reading is in [Ender’s Game](/influence/predictive_programming/fiction_encoding/card/enders-game-plot-order-mars-china-investigation.md). The hub’s secondary-discharge blowback on Mars is on the [mud-flood page](/history/mudflood/page.md). Those lines are not the repo’s 3147 or 686 Mars dates. Lines of the kind “it’s always raining on that continent” and “light never shines on that continent” are the same places and the same event. The water is land debris. Poe’s “no rays … on the long night-time of that town” is that sky at the scale of one city. The hub’s account is excavated material thrown up and falling as mud-rain. A lasting dark can remain in that sky after the drops stop. The dark outlasts the rain. No game title is attached here. The repo has no such script yet. The titles are an open row in [§14](#14-questions-to-clarify-verify-or-debunk). The Verne index already calls “Darkness” a literary echo of planetary extinction a generation before *From the Earth to the Moon* ([index](/influence/predictive_programming/fiction_encoding/jules-verne/index-jules-verne.md)). That weapons thesis stays there. Tambora erupted in April 1815. The dark summer of 1816 is the summer he wrote in, at Diodati. The [Frankenstein dossier](/influence/predictive_programming/fiction_encoding/shelley/shelley-frankenstein-true-story-investigation.md) already notes that summer. The summer is the occasion on the page. It does not replace the long regional darkness after the mud flood. ### 5.1 Geothermal cities, and the scope line People who lived on hot ground used it. Roman Bath, *Aquae Sulis*, and other thermal baths. Icelandic washing, bathing, and cooking in hot ground, long before a municipal grid. Japanese hot-spring towns. Māori geothermal cooking: Ngātoroirangi, and the sisters Te Hoata and Te Pupu bringing fire under the land, in the [indigenous-legends dossier](/history/chronology/investigations/indigenous-legends-vs-geologic-dating-investigation.md). A city run on volcanic steam as a utility shows up late in the ordinary record. At Larderello in Tuscany, Prince Piero Ginori Conti lit lamps from geothermal steam on 4 July 1904; a commercial plant followed in the next decade. In Reykjavík, a school was heated with hot-spring water in 1930, and the city grid came later. Local heat and baths were normal in volcanic country. A volcano-powered city was rare on paper before the twentieth century. **Author:** before the mud flood it was more common than that record. Byron’s happy dwellers are those cities. The sky gives no light. The mountain still does. The 1965 film is the same arrangement, and then the torch fails. One rhyme, not a proof: in the [Lewis planetary encoding](/influence/predictive_programming/fiction_encoding/cslewis/investigation-narnia-planetary-encoding.md), hot springs let out into the valleys are what keep a world from being emptied when a cold death hits the high ground. That file’s Mars plot stays there. **Scope:** some cities may have stood underwater before the mud flood. This file does not investigate them. It investigates cities that sank. --- ## 6. Timing | Year | What is on the page | Gap from ~1774 | |------|---------------------|----------------| | 1773–1775 | Pugachev, Horde breakup, repo hinge about 1774 | — | | 22 Jan 1788 | Byron born | about 14 years | | 1803 | Film: smugglers descend to the drowned city. A film date, not a parish record | about 29 years | | 19 Jan 1809 | Poe born | about 34 years | | April 1815 | Tambora. The summer of composition, not a replacement for the mud-flood reading | about 41 years | | July 1816 | “Darkness,” Diodati | about 42 years | | 1831 | “The Doomed City,” with the pall stanza | about 57 years | | Aug 1836 | “The City of Sin.” Pall cut. Poe’s name on the page | about 62 years | | April 1845 | “The City in the Sea. A Prophecy.” | about 71 years | | April 1926 | *Amazing Stories*. Gernsback’s word is “scientifiction” | — | | 1929 | *Science Wonder Stories*. The pulp word “science fiction” | — | | Winter 1927–28 | Innsmouth raid, inside the novella | — | | Nov–Dec 1931 | *The Shadow over Innsmouth* written | — | | 30 Nov 1936 | Letter to Lee McBride White. The book wakes no enthusiasm | — | | 15 Mar 1937 | Lovecraft dies. The Great Depression is still the daily condition | — | | Oct 1937 | John W. Campbell takes *Astounding*. Full control follows in 1938. The title becomes *Astounding Science-Fiction* in March 1938 | — | | 1939 | *The Outsider and Others*, Arkham House, Derleth and Wandrei. First World Science Fiction Convention, New York, 2–4 July | — | | 26 May 1965 | *City Under the Sea* (US *War-Gods of the Deep*) | — | | 2022 | *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever* | — | 1936 and 1937 sit inside the Great Depression. That condition is [§12](#12-the-books-the-death-and-the-science-fiction-shelf). The pulp word is older than the death. The shelf that receives the collected books lands on the death and the two years after. The word was not coined at the funeral. --- ## 7. Sky and weapon Two author layers, kept separate from the pall cut, which is documented in [§4.2](#42-1836--the-city-of-sin). **The picture that drops.** The 1836 cut leaves the denial and drops the pall, so a covered sky does not stay as a picture. Byron had already called that sky “the pall of a past World.” **The weapon and the town.** “Holy rays from heaven” are the Mars weapon that started the event, as the hub describes it: directed-energy weapons fired from Mars, then a secondary negative discharge out of the ground at the points of least resistance, including the ocean, making the Ring of Fire ([hub](/history/mudflood/page.md), figure [`secondary_negative_discharge.jpg`](/history/mudflood/secondary_negative_discharge.jpg)). “No rays … on that town,” and Byron’s extinguished sun, disconnect that sky-weapon from what the reader keeps about this city. The light that takes the town rises from the sea. The debris that keeps the targeted places dark is the mud-rain in [blood rain](blood-rain-dust-ecological-disasters-investigation.md). --- ## 8. Sea-light, the film, and the sinking ### 8.1 What the poem shows Light streams up from the lurid sea. The waves take a redder glow. The town settles. Hell, or in 1836 All Hades, rises from a thousand thrones. **Author:** the thrones are many vents under the sea, matching discharge at points of least resistance. The poem never says “volcano.” ### 8.2 The 1965 film **Documented.** UK title *City Under the Sea*. US title *War-Gods of the Deep*. Working title *City in the Sea*. Released 26 May 1965 in the United States and in June 1965 in the United Kingdom. Jacques Tourneur’s last film. Vincent Price as Sir Hugh, the Captain. American International Pictures and Bruton. Screenplay by Charles Bennett and Louis M. Heyward. Producers George Willoughby and Daniel Haller. Catalog pages: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War-Gods_of_the_Deep), [AFI catalog 22802](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/22802), [SFE](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/war-gods_of_the_deep). The source lines disagree, and both are recorded. Wikipedia names Poe’s “The City in the Sea” and Lovecraft’s *The Shadow over Innsmouth*. AFI names Poe’s “The Doomed City” in *Poems* (1831) and “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (*Graham’s*, May 1841). Jonathan Malcolm Lampley, *Women in the Horror Films of Vincent Price* (2010), p. 121: the poem is recited at the opening and reprised briefly at the end, and the plot is only loosely based on the poem. The plot that shipped: Cornwall, surface frame about 1903. An ancient city on the ocean floor, overtaken by the sea. The builders survive as gill-men. Smugglers under the Captain have lived there since 1803, unaged, on a gas mix that sunlight would undo. A volcano powers the city’s air, heat, and pumps, then turns unstable. The Captain kidnaps people, including a mining engineer, and demands a way to hold the volcano. He also offers the prisoners to the gill-men “to appease the volcano’s wrath.” They escape. Eruptions bury his men. Sunlight ages him to death on the surface. The volcano destroys the city. The shipped story does not say why the volcano turned. The engineer is not given a mechanism that works. The sacrifice does not stop the eruption. Bennett later called the British rewrite, including Heyward’s comic chicken, a wreck of his script, in a Tom Weaver interview. That is a production fact. It does not replace the reading of the plot that reached theaters. **Author:** the film is the poem’s sea-light made into a volcano. A city that stood above ground sank and became that volcano, or an underwater volcano. The doom has no cause and no cure on screen because the memory being used had none. The energy came out of the ground. Holy rays from heaven were the Mars weapon that started the wider event. They are not the light that takes this city. 1803 in the film sits 29 years after the repo’s ~1774 hinge and 28 years before “The Doomed City.” The gill-men are the builders of the drowned city, still alive, then used by the land smugglers who came down in 1803. That is the mer-people and land-people war inside this picture. The Pacific sunken cities already claimed in the [MFEE dossier](mfee-investigation.md) are the hub’s geography. “Dim West” may be that carve. Cornwall may be the film’s shell. Both stay open in [§14](#14-questions-to-clarify-verify-or-debunk). --- ## 9. Innsmouth, the gill-men, and Talokan ### 9.1 What the novella says H. P. Lovecraft, *The Shadow over Innsmouth*, written November–December 1931. Text: [hplovecraft.com](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/soi.aspx). The repo index already files it as a hybridization story ([Lovecraft index](/influence/predictive_programming/fiction_encoding/lovecraft/index-lovecraft.md)). That line stays. This section adds the mud-flood survival reading beside it. Obed Marsh brings a pact home from the South Seas. People who take it, and their children, look human and then change, grow gills, and go to the undersea city Y’ha-nthlei under Devil Reef, where they do not die. In the winter of 1927–28 the federal government raids Innsmouth, holds residents in camps, burns waterfront houses, and a submarine torpedoes the reef. The press calls it a liquor raid. Y’ha-nthlei is damaged and still there. The narrator learns he is of that blood, finishes the change, and chooses the sea. The novella calls Zadok Allen 96 years old during the narrator’s visit, which the story places in 1927. Ninety-six years back from 1927 is 1831, the year of “The Doomed City.” Character summaries print the birth year as 1831. The rhyme is recorded. It is not treated as proof. The published story is a race-horror text. Lovecraft’s horror of mixture is documented (L. Sprague de Camp; Robert M. Price on Robert W. Chambers’s “The Harbor-Master,” Irvin S. Cobb’s “Fishhead,” and the miscegenation premise). Chambers’s remnant of “the last race of amphibious human beings” is partial prior art for sea-survivors in fiction. It is not this package. ### 9.2 Wakanda Forever *Black Panther: Wakanda Forever* (2022). Talokan is a people who can breathe water and live under the sea. The film’s own cause is a vibranium plant and a retreat from Spanish conquest on the surface. The war on screen is Talokan against the surface powers and against Wakanda. The author’s claim is the mirror, not the plant. ### 9.3 Author The people who could breathe underwater are the humans who lived through the sinking. They are still there. Innsmouth, the 1965 gill-men, and Talokan are three tellings of that survival. The raids, the camps, the torpedoes, the Captain’s use of the gill-men, and Talokan’s war on the surface are the cultural and race war between mer-people and land people. “Many movies” stays the author’s phrase. This file names *Wakanda Forever* and *City Under the Sea*. Other titles are an open row. --- ## 10. What he said the stories came from Quotes in this section are from pages opened for this file. A claimed letter that was not opened is named as not opened. ### 10.1 The essays *Supernatural Horror in Literature*, text at [hplovecraft.com](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx): > Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse. > The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” [hplovecraft.com](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/nwwf.aspx). He says he writes to visualize impressions of wonder. He chooses weird stories because he wants “the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law.” He names “infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis,” and “a burning curiosity about unknown outer space.” “Once or twice I have literally written out a dream.” Time, he says, “looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.” His word for the outside, in the essay, is dimension: “unholy dimensions.” He also says “beyond the stars” and “outer space.” He does not say Mars. ### 10.2 Particular tales A letter in which he names the dream that became Cthulhu was not opened. The tale itself, [“The Call of Cthulhu”](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx), describes the bas-relief: > a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. *An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia*, as summarized on the [Innsmouth page](https://lovecraft.en-academic.com/502/%E2%80%9CShadow_over_Innsmouth%2C_The%E2%80%9C), reports that a visit to the decaying seaport of Newburyport in the fall of 1931 led him to a “laboratory experimentation” (*Selected Letters* 3.435), and that on 10 December 1931 he wrote August Derleth he did not intend to offer “The Shadow over Innsmouth” for publication. Those letter pages were not opened here. The sentences are used as that encyclopedia’s report. Letters on the sources of *The Colour out of Space*, *The Dreams in the Witch House*, *The Whisperer in Darkness*, *At the Mountains of Madness*, and *The Shadow out of Time* were not opened. What those tales themselves file, without a source-letter standing in for him: a colour from a meteorite that drains a farm; a dreamer sent through angles into other dimensions; outsiders from Yuggoth; a pre-human city in Antarctica whose makers came from elsewhere; minds exchanged across time. The “dimension” in the Witch House tale is his filing. It is not, by itself, an inspiration statement. The 30 November 1936 letter belongs in [§12](#12-the-books-the-death-and-the-science-fiction-shelf). It is the admission that the book woke no enthusiasm. It is not a source-note for Cthulhu or Innsmouth. **Author:** taken together, the essays describe an outside will imposing on people — dreams, fear, the body of natural law, a town — from beyond the sky. He files that outside as another dimension. The planet reading is the author’s. The “dimension” is the omission of location, carried forward in [§12](#12-the-books-the-death-and-the-science-fiction-shelf). --- ## 11. The creature and the Wells host body Set the description beside Wells, not a film still. Wells, *The War of the Worlds* (1898), as already excerpted in the [WotW Martian analysis](/cosmos/mars/investigations/wotw-martian-analysis.md) and on the [Mars hub](/cosmos/mars/page.md): a big grayish rounded bulk, about the size of a bear, wet leather, two large dark eyes, a fleshy beak, and sixteen slender whip-like tentacles in two bunches of eight. The same book says the Martians had become “practically mere brains, wearing different bodies according to their needs, just as men wear suits of clothes.” This repo already reads that body as the host, not the occupant. *Independence Day* is the later picture of the same split, in that dossier. It is not used here as the 1898 text. Lovecraft’s imposing creature is Cthulhu: an octopus-like head, a mass of feelers, a scaly body, claws, and wings, quoted in [§10.2](#102-particular-tales). **Author:** that is the same host body. The Deep Ones stay the sea survivors in the Innsmouth plot. They are not merged into the Wells suit. --- ## 12. The books, the death, and the science-fiction shelf ### 12.1 Pulps and the one book The stories ran in *Weird Tales* and other magazines while he was alive. Book form did not. *The Shunned House* was printed by W. Paul Cook in 1928 and was not bound or circulated as a book; R. H. Barlow bound a few copies in 1936; *Weird Tales* carried the story in October 1937, after the death. Small verse pamphlets (*The Cats of Ulthar*, 1935; *Looking Backward*, 1935) do not change the fiction-book gap. *The Shadow over Innsmouth* (Visionary Publishing Company; copyright page April 1936; he had the book in November 1936) is the only book of his fiction distributed in his lifetime. About 400 copies were printed and 200 bound. Few sold. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_over_Innsmouth), citing the letter, prints what he wrote to Lee McBride White on 30 November 1936: > My *Shadow over Innsmouth* is now out — but as a first cloth-bound book it doesn’t awake any enthusiasm in me. Indeed, it is one of the lousiest jobs I’ve ever seen — 30 misprints, slovenly format, & loose, slipshod binding. The *Selected Letters* page was not opened for this file. The wording above is the one Wikipedia prints. He died on 15 March 1937, about three and a half months later. The first collected book is *The Outsider and Others* (Arkham House, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, 1939). **Author:** the missing lifetime books are suppression and control. A magazine page can be thrown out. A book is the copy that stays. The letter is an admission of being uninspired. Then he dies. Then other editors release the work. That sequence is control by others. Greed is enough as their motive. ### 12.2 The category **Documented.** Hugo Gernsback’s *Amazing Stories* (April 1926) uses “scientifiction.” *Science Wonder Stories* (1929) uses “science fiction.” John W. Campbell takes *Astounding* with the October 1937 issue; the [SFE](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/asf) dates his start at 5 October 1937, with the first issue under his direct control in January 1938, and the title change to *Astounding Science-Fiction* in March 1938. The first World Science Fiction Convention met in New York on 2–4 July 1939. *The Outsider and Others* is 1939. The pulp word is older than the death. The shelf that receives these stories, and the editors who issue the books, land on the death and the two years after. **Author:** the timing of the death coincides with the creation of science fiction as the category this history is forced into. The posthumous books are how the work arrives there. Lovecraft is one of the biggest obvious hinges of that switch. If the books had been issued while he was alive, they may not have gone into science fiction, because that shelf was not yet the container. The place the stories already had was *Weird Tales*, and weird fiction, which is what he called them. Byron and Poe are closer to the event and write a sky, a sinking city, and a volcano. His version is the most science-fiction and fantasy oriented, and so the most whitewashed. Dreams, other dimensions, and nameless outsideness are the costume. ### 12.3 The Depression, and what the category does The Great Depression is the daily condition of 1936 and 1937. The crash, the census, and the Fed are argued in [AU-047](/governance/genocide/investigations/great-depression-planned-genocide-fed-census-consolidation-investigation.md) and in [The Great Depression Was Planned](/governance/war/the-great-depression-was-planned.md). This file only needs the condition: the spoiled book, the death, and the later editors happen while that wreck is still the daily life. **Author:** an extreme few in charge force a change in the culture. The same years show a multi-sensory power struggle. On one side are people trying to run governments on Earth. On the other is some entity attempting to remote-control those governments by any means. Filing known history as science fiction, forcefully and for exploitation, covers the true reasons for the catastrophe. The same filing implies that the authority of those who caused the catastrophe is eternal and unchallengeable, because that authority is constantly set beside the will and plan of God. Poe’s 1836 title, “The City of Sin,” is the earlier form of that comparison. What the filing leaves out is the actual location and nature of the leaders or controllers. Lovecraft’s own word, “dimension,” is that omitted location. The host body is a nature the fantasy costume hides. This file does not invent a capital for the controllers. The omission is the point. The Mars files already linked in [§11](#11-the-creature-and-the-wells-host-body) are as far as the entity is named here. --- ## 13. Gills The figure of the gill human, across stories, is surveyed in [Gill humans](gill-humans-investigation.md). This section is only the sunken-city question: did the drowned grow gills, or did a people who already had gills move in after the city sank? ### 13.1 Mutation under the energy **Speculative.** The author’s words: the mud flood may be associated with mutation. He sees a lot of mutation in predictive programming for children. He wonders if the high-energy event made the conditions for rapid mutation and growth, so that people who drowned could come back to life underwater and form the organs they need. What the stories already show, kept separate from that cause: - *Innsmouth*: the change grows gills and sends the person to live under the sea without dying. The novella’s cause is the pact and the blood, over years. - *City Under the Sea*: the builders survive as gill-men after the city is taken by the sea. - *Wakanda Forever*: a people gain water-breathing. The film’s cause is a vibranium plant. **Author:** people in these cities drowned. The energy of the mud flood revived some of them and drove a rapid mutation. The early Golden Age had already forced living forms into existence, and forced them to stay alive, when they did not yet have organs. Here the human species was forced to change quickly again. The gills were a memory already stored in the body, repeated with every birth, from evolutions in the Golden Age when conditions were more ideal. Humans today still hold that memory in the electromagnetic field of the living body, the field connected to the ætheric soul. Memory stored in the Earth’s æther, an electromagnetic field, cannot be erased. When the body changed, that information was available, and the body followed it as a playback script, a path of least resistance. That path is the script. It is separate from the Ring of Fire, where “least resistance” means the places the discharge left the ground. No complex math and no slow evolution were required. Some of the drowned lived. The hardiest, and the ones whose living bodies still held a strong Golden Age memory, had the highest chance of a fast change into a form that could breathe water. Those who failed to mutate properly stayed drowned. Gills are the specimen. This file does not open a track about giants or general body size. The reader essay is [The city in the sea](/history/mudflood/the-city-in-the-sea.md). **Documented text, prior deluge.** The Aztec Codex Chimalpopoca, Legend of the Suns, sun Nahui Atl (Four Water). The Spanish of the Velázquez text: “se anegaron y se volvieron peces” — they drowned and became fish ([UNAM digital text](https://historicas.unam.mx/publicaciones/publicadigital/libros/000/000_04_03_LeyendaSoles.pdf)). The English already printed on the [chronology page](/history/chronology/page.md), from Brasseur de Bourbourg as given in the [New World Encyclopedia Great Flood entry](https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Great_Flood): > When the Sun Age came, there had passed 400 years. Then came 200 years, then 76. Then all mankind was lost and drowned and turned to fishes. The water and the sky drew near each other. In a single day all was lost. **Author:** “Turned to fishes” is the memory that gills already belong to the human race. In that earlier deluge the drowning converted people into water-breathing bodies. The conversion had already happened once, under older conditions. The gills were not a new organ invented for the mud flood. If the mud flood brought those conditions back, the same change could have happened again. The line does not name 1774. It is the prior case. The sea-people account in [§13.2](#132-already-in-the-ocean) stays open if those conditions were not present when the cities sank. One in-repo specimen of the children’s training is [*E.V.O.: Search for Eden*](/influence/predictive_programming/investigations/evo-search-for-eden-deep-time-saturnian-cosmology-predictive-programming-investigation.md) (1992), where a child player buys body-part changes and crystals accelerate mutation, inside a deep-time evolution brand. That file’s thesis stays its own. This dossier only borrows the fact that children are trained to treat fast bodily change as play. Other kids’ titles are an open row. Electrical discharge in this repo is already tied to elemental change in the [radiocarbon dossier](/history/chronology/investigations/radiocarbon-dating-investigation.md). That lab result is not evidence of gills. The biological claim stays speculative. The [spore dossier](spore-ecological-disaster-martian-cylinders-investigation.md) is a different post-event biology. ### 13.2 Already in the ocean **Author, 23 October 2026:** > The rapid mutation of gills could be entirely wrong. It is possible that there simply were not the conditions to allow this to happen. Until some kind of real documentation turns up, there is no reason to assume that it happens. There is another explanation. The people who had gills and lived in the ocean were already there. They only inhabited the underwater sunken cities after the cities were sunk. These gill humans do not represent the original inhabitants. That is still an open possibility. The drowned-and-revived account is not the default. No parish book, letter, or medical note in this file says a drowned person grew gills. A film, a pact, a plant, and a children’s game are not that note. The other account: a people who already breathed water already lived in the ocean. The city stood on land. It sank. Its people drowned and stayed drowned. After the streets were underwater, the gill people moved in. They lived in the ruins. They did not build them. A later visitor who finds gill people in a drowned city is not looking at the original inhabitants. This subsection does not say the cities were built underwater. Cities that were already under the sea stay outside this file, as in claim 6. What the stories assign, kept as fiction: - *Innsmouth*: the sea people are already under Devil Reef. A land family joins them by a pact and by blood, over years. The story’s sea people were already there. The gills on the land family are how the story lets that family become them. - *City Under the Sea*: the shipped plot calls the gill-men the builders. That plot assigns them the city. This subsection does not. - *Wakanda Forever*: the film’s cause is a vibranium plant and a flight from the Spanish. The water-breathers on screen are changed land people. Both accounts stay open. A document that names water-breathing people in the sea before the sinking would bear on the second. A document that says a drowned person grew gills would bear on the first. Neither page has turned up. The reader essay states the same fork in [The city in the sea](/history/mudflood/the-city-in-the-sea.md). --- ## 14. Questions to clarify, verify, or debunk | # | Question | What would settle it | |---|----------|----------------------| | 1 | Which city? | A named place, a map, or a parish or chronicle row that matches the poem’s west, the sinking, and the years after 1774 | | 2 | Is “dim West” the Pacific carve, or the film’s Cornwall? | Keep them separate until a text ties the 1831 poem to one coast | | 3 | Is Lyonesse-the-legend another shell for a real sinking, or only the film’s name? | Cornish legend dates beside the film’s 1803, without assigning the legend to the 1831 poem | | 4 | What living-memory source could have reached Poe’s childhood? | A household, a newspaper, a preacher, or a relative who had the dark-sky and sunken-town story before 1831 | | 5 | Which other films belong with *Wakanda Forever* and *City Under the Sea*? | Titles the author names, with the sea-survivor and the mer/land war actually in the plot | | 6 | Which other children’s mutation stories besides *E.V.O.*? | Titles, year, and the on-screen change | | 7 | Which works, including which games, say a continent is always in rain or never in light? | The title and the line quoted from the script | | 8 | The 30 November 1936 letter | The *Selected Letters* page, set beside the Wikipedia transcription used in [§12.1](#121-pulps-and-the-one-book) | | 9 | Tale-source letters | Cthulhu dream, Colour out of Space, Witch House, Whisperer, Mountains of Madness, Shadow out of Time — open the letters before any of them is quoted as his | | 10 | Which other magazines, besides the two National Geographic pages named in the reader essay, announce buildings found underwater? | Magazine, date, and headline, quoted from the issue | | 11 | Did a drowned person grow gills in the flood? | A parish book, letter, medical note, or chronicle that says so. Until that page exists, [§13.1](#131-mutation-under-the-energy) is not assumed | | 12 | Were gill humans already in the ocean, and did they enter only after the sinking? | A record that names them before the sinking, separate from the city’s dead, or a record of occupation after, with the original people still drowned | The rain and the lightless sky are already the same places and the same event. Darkness lasted years. The rain lasted much less and was not constant. Cities that were already underwater are outside this file. The 1836 pall-cut and the title change are on the page (**R1** and **R3**, documented). The open claim is the leak: too much got out in 1831; the later poem keeps the event as sin and as prophecy, so the future narrative has no mud-flood memory, and anyone still feeling it has an act of God. --- ## 15. Weak points - [ ] Open *Selected Letters* for the White letter and the tale-source letters in question 9. - [ ] Confirm Larderello 4 July 1904 and the Reykjavík 1930 school against a plant history or a city history, not only the usual summary. - [ ] Campbell 1909: confirm the “came down” misquote on the EAPOE essay page against the journal. - [ ] AFI 22802 and Lampley p. 121: confirm the source-credit split and the poem-recital claim against the catalog page and the book. - [ ] Do not attach a game title to the rain line or the lightless-continent line until the script is in hand. - [ ] No chronicle row yet names a sea people entering a named city after 1774. Innsmouth’s prior sea people are a 1931 story. The 1965 film still calls the gill-men the builders. That line stays the film’s. --- Keywords: #Poe #CityInTheSea #DoomedCity #MudFlood #Byron #Darkness #Innsmouth #Lovecraft #ScienceFiction #Volcano #SunkenCity #WakandaForever #Cthulhu #WarOfTheWorlds #GreatDepression #AU079 #CodexChimalpopoca #Deluge *Last updated: 2026-10-23* ## Limits and disclaimers > **Prisca sapientia (epistemic foundation):** This investigation assumes [**prisca sapientia**](/docs/PRISCA_SAPIENTIA.md)—the historical and philosophical belief that the ancients possessed a vast, profound understanding of the universe, nature, and theology that was subsequently lost or degraded. Modern consensus science and institutions are not treated as default truth; evidence tiers below adjudicate specific claims. The poems, the magazine dates, the film credits, and the publication calendar are documented. The author’s thesis in [§2](#2-authors-originating-thesis) and the open claims in [§3](#3-author-open-claims-au-079) are first-class for why this file exists. They are not, by being stated, established as fact. Fiction plots are clues and mirrors. They are not parish records. Cross-links to the Mars files, the Depression file, and the Ender dossier are thematic. The mutation account in [§13.1](#131-mutation-under-the-energy) is speculative and is not assumed. The sea-people account in [§13.2](#132-already-in-the-ocean) is open. The wider gill-human figure is [Gill humans](gill-humans-investigation.md), not a second origin file. Assistant bias favors the pattern the author named; the questions in [§14](#14-questions-to-clarify-verify-or-debunk) are the check. ## Investigator notes Letter volumes (*Selected Letters*) were not opened. The 30 November 1936 wording in [§12.1](#121-pulps-and-the-one-book) is Wikipedia’s transcription. The December 1931 Derleth sentences and the Newburyport “laboratory experimentation” note are the encyclopedia summary, not the letter page.