Galápagos Islands: The Gate

18) The Gate
Y’ha-n’thal, June 29-30, 1845

A) The Flooded Tunnel
Once through the mouth of the whale, the canal becomes a tunnel, its walls carved to resemble the ribbed esophagus of a massive sea creature. The tunnel is broad but low, about 15 feet wide but only 5 feet high above the surface of the water. The water itself is approximately 7 feet deep, and retains its extraordinary clarity and pale green luminescence. The left side of the tunnel supports a flat walkway of sorts, a 3-foot wide ridge submerged 8 inches below the waterline. Lowell or Castro remember the walkway with a shudder. It took hours of sloshing through water to traverse the tunnel, an exhausting trek that resulted in many slips and dunks—the boat is a welcome addition! The tunnel is damp, drops of saltwater trickling down from the ceiling to spatter the travelers’ faces. The sound of the dripping mingles with the soft plash of paddles, and one can sense the weight of the ocean pressing upon the arched ceiling.

B) St. Elmo’s Fire
The canal is twelve miles long but seems endless. About halfway through their voyage, the boat is rocked by a series of tremors. The tunnel becomes one long, stone throat; humming a low-frequency drone the travelers feel in their bone marrow. The water quivers into standing waves that shift patterns as the tremors modulate in frequency. The same static electricity that heralded the thunderstorm returns, pricking up hairs and gooseflesh. A ball of St. Elmo’s fire materializes, a pale green visitor flickering from one metallic surface to the next. The characters watch in amazement as the globe of plasma explores the boat, moving like a sentient creature in search of hidden treasure. The tremors last for ten minutes, then everything fades: the electricity discharges, the water relaxes, and the drone tapers to a low susurrus. Lowell and Castro know exactly what happened—the Gate to Thal’n’lai has been opened and closed.

C) The Gate
A half-mile before the tunnel ends, the ribbed walls gradually transform into a trapezoidal passage of unadorned stone planes. The canal terminates at a landing carved to resemble a scallop shell. At the top of the landing is something that looks like an upright mermaid’s purse, a massive egg-case of greenish soapstone. Surrounding this bizarre monolith is even more disturbing statuary: a trio of froggish humanoids in the throes of copulation, their writhing forms lovingly enfolded within the tentacles of a giant octopus. The eyes of the octopus gaze down at the landing with unsettling Erol Otus malevolence, bright with an iridescent sheen. Viewing this statuary requires a 0/1 Sanity roll.

Cthulhu, by the incomparable Erol Otus

This is the Gate to Thal’n’lai, and only those who’ve read the “Volcán Wolf Testimony” know how to open it. (See “Getting the Gist of It” in Encounter 15-B.) Leaving the whaleboat, the supplicant must face the mermaid’s purse and place his hands and feet into a series of depressions. Fingers and toes must be contorted into the correct configuration, and a certain spiral pattern must be fixed in the mind’s eye. The supplicant presses his mouth against a hollow ring on the surface of the “mermaid’s purse” and speaks a string of syllables in a terrible, croaking language: Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh! If this is the supplicant’s first time opening the Gate, speaking the invocation costs 1/1D3 Sanity points. Knowledge of Greek or a Hard Education roll is reminded of the “chorus of frogs” from Aristophanes’ comedy, The Frogs.

The stone interior of the monolith amplifies the guttural syllables weirdly, spreading them across the landing so they seem to come from several locations at once: the mouths of the copulating Deep Ones, the octopus god, even somewhere behind the characters. Once the speaker has concluded, the sequence echoes three times, each iteration more distorted and inhuman. As this occurs, a series of remarkable events plays out. First, the temperature and pressure drop sharply, causing a rime of ice to crust the canal and the travelers’ ears to pop. The water’s glow changes from pale green to cool blue, and a strange sensation of flattening ripples from the walls, as if everything becomes momentarily two-dimensional. Anyone looking at the froggish trio becomes convinced the statues have changed, perhaps shifted—and were their faces always leering like that?

As soon as the final syllable fades away, the temperature and pressure return to normal. The glow remains blue, and if anyone samples the water, they’re surprised to discover it’s no longer saline. Characters who expected a door to open, or some kind of magical portal to appear may be confused—did they fail? What about the tremors, the static electricity? More experienced travelers understand that they have already passed through the Gate, and are now deep underwater, miles away from Albemarle Island. It’s time to get back into the boat and paddle “back down” the canal.

D) A Tunnel Transformed
Once the boat gets a half-mile from the landing, it becomes quite clear the travelers are not, in fact, going “back down” the canal. The trapezoidal walls continue long past the point where they should have returned to ribbed carvings. The tunnel is also growing imperceptibly larger, eventually becoming an expansive corridor nearly 30 feet wide and 40 feet high. While the whaleboat remains the most convenient way to travel this subterranean canal, the left walkway remains, now elevated above the waterline for those who’d prefer traveling on foot. Despite the increased size of the passage, the blue glow of the water provides ample illumination.

E) The Murals
The first bas-relief murals appear halfway through the tunnel. Although they have many similarities to the those in the temple, these panels are larger, more ambitious, and even more lifelike—they seem grown from the rock, shepherded into fantastic shapes by some alien craftsmanship. They’re also more mathematically pure, a cleaner distillation of the repulsive geometries and recursive spirals of Y’ha-n’thal. (An Appraise or Archeology roll recognizes them as the temple’s aesthetic precursors, like comparing original Roman architecture to eighteenth-century neoclassicalism.) As before, the murals generally depict seascapes. But while the temple walls were largely populated by recognizable creatures—whales, sharks, squid—here’s a gallery culled from a weary eternity of extinctions and renewals; epoch following epoch like a string of playing cards. Sure, a few creatures may be identified with Science (Paleontology) rolls—there’s some frighteningly large trilobites; this panel depicts a plesiosaur locked in combat with an ichthyosaur; and there’s Professor Lowell’s own Thalassiodracon luveli—but that only scratches the surface of a fossil record unsuspected in its monstrous variety.

Prisoner Scenario: The Gate

If Lowell has been cooperative, Quiring allows him to open the Gate, and continues to engage the professor in a discussion of prehistoric life—“I believe this plesiosaur is your discovery, yes? Did you ever anticipate it would have such external markings?” If Lowell remains hostile, Quiring speaks the froggish words himself and refrains from conversation. Captive “candidates” can only guess at what’s happening, and are not permitted to take off the helmet.

White Leviathan, Chapter 4—Galápagos Islands
[Back to Encounter 17, Y’ha-n’thal | White Leviathan TOC | Forward to Encounter 19, Thal’n’lai]

Author: A. Buell Ruch
Last Modified: 2 December 2023
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
White Leviathan PDF: [TBD]