The story of the Temple is in a form of a found manuscript written by a commander of a German First World War submarine commander Karl Heinrich. At the beginning of his narrative, Heinrich describes how they sink a British freighter and the lifeboats of its crew. After they resurface, they find a drowned seaman clinging from the railing of the submarine.
They search the body and find a carved ivory statue from his pocket. As the statue seems valuable, an officer. Lt. Kienze decides to keep it for himself. The body is dumped back in the ocean, but the crewmen report on how it seemed like it was staring at them and swam away instead of sinking into the depths.
After the submarine submerges again, it gets caught in a current pulling it southward. The men begin to feel fatigued and start seeing nightmares, some reporting seeing the faces of the dead men of their freighter they sunk swimming past the portholes. The commander has the man whipped, discarding the pleas of his crew to discard the ivory statue the men believe to be the cause of the nightmares. To maintain discipline, he even has some of the men executed.
The matters accelerate when an explosion leaves their ship without navigation and the men begin to plead that they should surrender to the nearby U.S. This leads to another execution, which quiets the men. Soon after they are forced to submerge when storm waves begin to threaten the ship, leaving them under the water and at the mercy of south pulling current after their ballast tanks fail to repressurize.
As the ship slowly sinks deeper, the remaining crew attempts a mutiny, raving about the ivory statue, breaking the rest of the ship in the process. Heinrich kills them, leaving only him and increasingly more delirious Kienze the sole passengers of the ship. Outside the ship, an eerie group of dolphins follow them, deeper than any scientist has thought possible.
Kienze finally snaps, babbling on how someone is calling him, urging them to abandon the ship and go outside. Naturally, Heinrich believes his mate to be mad. He agrees to help Kienze operate the airlock, now remaining the sole survivor of the ship's crew.
The submarine finally hits the ocean floor. Using the little battery power the ship has left, Heinrich discovers he's stranded in the middle of a sunken city, dominated by a big, dark temple. Believing to have found the lost Atlantis, Heinrich spends the remaining battery power of the ship to explore his new surroundings donning a deep dive suit. Hallucinations grab him and he feels he can no longer resist the call of the mysterious call stemming from the temple. Before entering the temple, he seals the manuscript in a bottle and releases it in the hopes it finds someone.
The Temple provides even more building blocks for the Cthulhu mythos Lovecraft became famous for. The story has a sense of impending doom for everyone involved when the mysterious forces beyond the control of mere men take control. The city under the ocean, built by people long dead and governed by the malicious deity is a stable element of the grim ancient ones, just as is the madness they cause.
Critics have stated, that the portrayal of the German officer's militaristic nature is a form of crude satire, which mars the story just as do the many supernatural elements taking place, as they don't form a coherent whole. But at the same time, you can also ask, if they are even meant to form a coherent story, as it is narrated from a perspective of a man, who believes he is the only sane member of the crew left. He sees everyone else around him as weak and superstitious when he is the only one not succumbing to childish fears.
In a way, you can see the whole thing as written by someone, who is trying to convince himself of his own heroism and superiority over other weaker men under him. He is constantly justifying his actions on the grounds of being a German officer, a man of reason and science all the while he himself is gradually going insane. Only at the final stages, he makes a partial confession on the events having an effect on him. He still maintains he had done nothing wrong, that everyone else was wrong, but at least he admits he is not as strong as he believed himself to be.
Like many of Lovecraft's narratives, you can take everything Heinrich tells with a grain of salt. Either it all happens just as he tells it or it all is just a figment in his lessening sanity. This is, after all, a tale told by someone in extreme duress who by his own account had people around him going insane. So why wouldn't that have affected Heinrich as well?
Comments
Post a Comment