R'lyeh

"The tangible substance of earth's supreme terror-the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh…" is one of several evocative, haunting descriptions of the gargantuan lair featured in The Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft wrote of "the unbelievable size of the…stone blocks," "the great carven monolith," and the "colossal statues and bas-reliefs." The unearthly aspect of R'lyeh is apparent from the "abnormal, non-Euclidean" geometry of the place where "…twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles…"

The map coordinates Lovecraft gave for lost R'lyeh place it in the Southeast Pacific; a watery Empty Quarter halfway between South America and New Zealand. Back in the late 1990s, the Discovery Channel program, Creatures of the Abyss, and Scientific American magazine, made curious references to strange undersea noises and recently discovered seamounts in the same part of the Pacific…