The Lovecraftian Thing a Day (2018) No.226: The Elder Pharos?

Today’s offering is another original piece of Steve Lines’ artwork - I can’t recall what this one is titled, but I find the imagery intensely evocative of two speculative zones of abyssal horror found in Lovecraft’s work: Kadath in the Cold Waste, and the Plateau of Leng (which supposedly borders the former region); indeed, the image reminds me of the description of Leng found in ‘The Elder Pharos’, the 27th sonnet of Lovecraft’s The Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet cycle:

From Leng, where rocky peaks climb bleak and bare
Under cold stars obscure to human sight,
There shoots at dusk a single beam of light
Whose far blue rays make shepherds whine in prayer.
They say (though none has been there) that it comes
Out of a pharos in a tower of stone,
Where the last Elder One lives on alone,
Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums.

The Thing, they whisper, wears a silken mask
Of yellow, whose queer folds appear to hide
A face not of this earth, though none dares ask
Just what those features are, which bulge inside.
Many, in man’s first youth, sought out that glow,
But what they found, no one will ever know.