"Under the Pyramids" by H.P. Lovecraft, for Harry Houdini

This story was published under several other names, like "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" and "Entombed with the Pharaohs". It was originally credited to Harry Houdini, so we can consider this one a ghost writing rather than a collaboration.Show more

Personally, this is the type of story I was hoping to get a lot more of when I first started reading Lovecraft!

Mycerinus is a Hellenized version of the name Menkaure, and holy smokes, for the life of me I could not figure out the correct pronunciation of it. Multiple recordings on youtube disagreed, the various translation tools online disagreed, so what am I supposed to do with it? I have no idea! Ugh, why does this kind of confusion exist?! It may be a relatively obscure word, but the phonetics of the Greek language are not obscure, so how is there no agreement on it?

Well, I'm sure I butchered many an Arabic word besides, so I shouldn't rant overly much about the one Greek word that is used only one time in the story when I could rant about so many other words. Like 'sambuke'. Oy, these Old Time English-speaking authors and their love of foreign words in their writing...

Hell, I had the damnedest time correctly pronouncing 'Khephren', always trying to say 'Khephran' instead. No idea why my mind kept converting that final 'e' to an 'a', but I just kept doing it over and over and over. Very infuriating! I wouldn't even be surprised if at least one instance of the 'a' pronunciation managed to slip past in editing and and make it into the release version. Ah well. If you hear it, let me know in the comments :-P

Tarbush = fez. Fez is a far more fun word to say :D

Minnehaha? I'm an American and even I didn't recognize that one, but it comes from one of Longfellow's poems, "The Song of Hiawatha" and is the name of one of the female native American characters in the story.

To follow along: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/up.aspx