"I believe it is a symbolic pillar of a mystical prison. The hidden chamber within the Obelisk is the Chamber of Silence- literally 'the room in which the mouth is shut'– an earthly model of the Prisoner’s unearthly cell."

"The room where the mouth is shut, huh?"

"The Revelations of Dagon is cryptic at the best of times."

He had thought that the Order of Dagon were Christians when he was in college but the name Dagon has come up enough times that he is no longer nearly as confident as he was five years ago.

"Now how does... Dagon... tie into all this." And also what is it.

"Dagon is an ancient Mesopotamian deity. If venerated, he brought his followers grain and fish."

"Was there much contact between the Kingdom of Axum and Mesopotamia? I suppose you have Christianity spreading in this area at about that time, but presumably you mean that Dagon predates that era - ?"

"There was absolutely a great deal of trade. The Biblical Queen of Sheba was Ethiopian, and Ethiopia is home to a lost tribe of Jews." Another sip of whiskey.

They hear the shouting of soldiers from outside. Acuna seems unbothered.

Araari is also unbothered. The shouting is about how someone has FAILED to feed their camel and he is STARVING and what kind of INCOMPETENT ARE YOU. Sorry to everyone who doesn't speak Italian.

Is Acuna really the best source on how bothered to be. 

"Mmm. Then I suppose it should be unsurprising to see other religious ideas spreading between the two areas."

Also did they ask at all about what the 1926 digsite actually contained, because he tried to bring that up and apparently this tripped up various conversational approaches so he's wary about bringing it up again.

"The Revelations of Dagon were also what lead me to Dallol."

look she is working on it. she's already brought up - aha here we go. "Oh? What was the connection there?"

"It had been translated before, of course. But I did new work on the fragments concerning an ancient deity concerned with power and hierarchy and strength. Those passages, properly interpreted, suggested an ancient focus of worship at what I believed was Dallol. Naturally, I was vindicated when we arrived and we unearthed the temple exactly where I expected we’d find it."

Hierarchy, power, strength, all reminds him of that essay by Samson fucking Trammel. (Mordred is taking notes on this conversation to compare with Anemone later.)

"That must have been terribly gratifying. Was all of the work at that site lost in the eruption, or did you manage to salvage anything?"

"I have a few sketches... and of course my memories."

"We'd love to hear about it. Was it a temple of Dagon? The notes Ayers left indicated that there might be a connection to something else. I couldn't make sense of everything he left in his notes - I don't think his drug habit was very good for his lucidity - but he said something about a deity he called Gol-Goroth?"

"I don't know the deity's name, but it was not a temple of Dagon. Imagery was all wrong. Dagon is-- water, fish, that sort of thing. The Dallol site was mouths."

"Huh," she says, as if this is remotely surprising. "Have you seen anything else like it?"

"Never. The reliefs we found inside the temple, in the chamber with the statue, showed the ancient people venerating some deity represented by the mouth, preparing themselves for its worship, making offerings to it, even feeding themselves to it. And.. there was... well, there was..."

"There was?"

Acuna takes a big gulp of whiskey. "There was a mouth there. A statue of one, I mean, it had to be, obviously it wasn't-- but it was carved in detail like you’ve never seen, made of some rock we hadn’t seen before, probably quarried in the brine fields before Christ, boiled off now, fallen beneath the crust. A giant, screaming mouth, all tongues and a dozen kinds of teeth and lips that were… well, obscene."

“That sounds horrifying.” Araari does not look surprised, although she does look very sympathetic.