Podcasts about aroused

Sintonía: "Seksek" - Baba Zula1.- "Don´t Wanna Fight" y "Shoegaze" de Alabama Shakes (Rough Trade, 2015)2.- "Till The End" y "Dream Girl" de Curtis Harding (ANTI-, 2017)3.- "Curse Me Good" de The Heavy" (Counter, 2012)4.- "One Girl/One Boy" y "Station (Meet Me At The)" de !!! (Warp, 2013)5.- "Start a Fire" y "Speaking In Codes" de Radio 4 (City Slang, 2002)6.- "Aroused", "A Chore" y "Too Bad" de Tom Vek (Island, 2011)7.- "Boyhood" de The Japanese House (Dirty Hit, 2023)Escuchar audio

Welcome to the Celestial Insights Podcast, the show that brings the stars down to Earth! Each week, astrologer, coach, and intuitive Celeste Brooks of Astrology by Celeste will be your guide. Her website is astrologybyceleste.com.  

A horny woman invents her own game to secure a seduction.by Bumpinguglies. - listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. They say it's not a good idea to fool around at the office Christmas party, a piece of advice she was deliberately choosing to ignore. Her decision had been made the moment he had walked in the door. Feeling horny and with a few drinks under her belt, she had decided right there and then that she was going to fuck him.Her plan was a simple one. Sitting on a sofa opposite where he was standing with his colleagues and knowing that any man couldn't resist looking up a woman's skirt, she casually kept uncrossing and crossing her legs, parting them just enough to keep giving him and only him a good look between her legs and the thin white strip of material nestled between her thighs. Her drink was on the coffee table and she also made sure he got full view of her ample breasts in her low cut dress each time she bent forward to pick it up. She smiled inwardly to herself as she spied him pretending not to notice but staring intently between her legs every time she moved them. She could feel his gaze burning into her panties and it made her pussy tingle and her nipples hard with excitement knowing what thoughts must be going through his mind and how arousing the sight of those panties were to him. She even suspected that the bulge in his pants had grown since she first saw it and the thought of it made her even more aroused. She could feel her pussy moistening inside her panties with every moment that passed and every look he gave them.Deciding he had looked enough, she got up off the couch and carrying her empty glass made to walk to the bar. As she passed him she stopped.“It's shaved and wet.” She whispered into his ear.“I'm sorry.” he asked, as if he hadn't heard her properly and at the same time shocked and embarrassed he had been caught out.“If you want a better look, meet me in my office upstairs in five minutes and bring that nice cock.” she told him and walked off, her hand casually brushing the front of his pants, enough for him to feel it but not enough for anyone else to notice.It was the longest five minutes of his life, standing there talking to his workmates with a stiffening cock in his pants and thoughts of her shaved pussy coursing through his mind. Excusing himself, he made straight for the elevator, his heart beating hard with anticipation.She sat on the corner of the desk in her dimly lit office counting down the seconds hoping he would take up her invitation. Like him, her heart was racing and her pussy ached with anticipation. She couldn't help reaching down and running her fingers over her panties, caressing her pussy through them, her fingertip pressing the material into the moist cleft between her lips.She heard the elevator ding and she jumped off the desk. Suddenly, he was there, his silhouette framed in the doorway against the well-lit outer office. They came together in the middle of the office and he kissed her passionately, his hands sliding up her outer thighs under her skirt. Breathing hard, she reached down and pressed her hand to his groin, feeling the hardness there. She fumbled with his zipper as his hand slid down inside her panties seeking out the wet pussy within. Her hand now inside his pants gripped his rigid throbbing cock as his fingers eagerly parted her silky wet lips and found her tingling hard clit. She groaned with pleasure and began to pull him as he rubbed her clit using her own wetness to lubricate it, quickly propelling her towards the orgasm her pussy craved. She pulled him faster as her arousal grew and grew and her legs opened wider and began to quiver. With a gasp she froze, gripping his cock tight, her whole body jerking as she came with a loud groan of pleasure. With his hard swollen cock sticking out the front of his pants leaking precum, he guided her backwards to the desk and made to pull down her panties. She stopped him.“No, not here.” she whispered, still recovering from her orgasm. As much as she wanted that hard cock inside her, for some reason she didn't want to do it there in the office.“Let's go back to mine.” She suggested. Reluctantly, he withdrew his hands from her panties and stuffed his aching swollen cock back in his pants. They kissed once more and made for the elevator hand in hand.When you are horny and desperate to fuck everything takes so long. That was the case with the cab ride to her place. In the darkened back of the cab she had rubbed the front of his trousers and he in turn had done the same over the front of her panties. It had made the cab ride seem longer but the thrill and excitement of their fondling and the level of arousal it created was worth it.Inside her apartment she decided to slow things down by pouring them both a drink. She wanted the night to last, not be over with quick five minute fuck. Reclined on one end of the couch with him sitting on the other end facing her, she reached down and pulled off her panties, threw them on the floor and spread her legs wide.“I said you would get a better look at it.” she said smiling. “What do you think? Does it make you hard?”“Fuck yes!” he groaned, starting at her gorgeous shaved pussy with its slightly parted pink glistening lips and dripping wet opening between them.“Would you like to taste it?” she asked, instantly making herself even wetter at the thought of what she just said. Without answering, he put down his drink, slid along the couch and bent between her legs. She was so wet and the musky smell of her pussy filled his nostrils inflaming his senses. Hungrily he began licking her, savoring the sweet taste of her pussy, his tongue rasping against her hard clit and delving into her saturated opening. She moaned and her head lolled back as his tongue sent waves of pleasure from her pussy right up through her entire body. Sensing she was about to cum he licked at her clit and flooded opening faster. With shaking legs she reached down, grasped the back of his head and crushed his face between her legs. She came with a huge groan, grinding her pussy up and down over his mouth.With a final few soft licks of her delicious pussy, he straightened back up, moved to the other end of the couch, retrieved his drink and took a long hard swig of it.“Let me see your cock.” She said, lying back with her drink back in hand and her legs still wide open. Once again replacing his drink, he undid his belt, pulled down his zipper and reached into his pants. His rigid cock almost sprung from them, the engorged head glistening with precum and the thick shaft throbbing with excitement.“Stroke it for me.” She commanded, staring at it longingly and imagining the feel of it inside her. Fuck, it was so nice and big. Taking his cock between thumb and fingertips he began to slowly stroke his cock, his gaze firmly between her legs as his hand moved up and down the rigid shaft. The sight of him pulling himself had her breathing heavily and her pussy wanting to cum again. Her eyes fixed on his hand and cock, she reached down and began to rub her clit. Watching her masturbating had his cock jerking with excitement in his hand. He groaned trying to block out the sensation of his hand on his cock. He didn't want to cum, couldn't cum, not before he had felt himself inside that gorgeous tight pussy. Stroking as slow as he could, he watched her rubbing get faster and then turn frantic until her pussy sprayed wetness over the couch between her legs as she came. The sight of her cumming and squirting pussy was sending him over the top. Desperately he squeezed the shaft of his cock to stave off his orgasm. He was on the very edge for what seemed like an eternity until it finally subsided. Releasing the grip on his cock, he watched as one solitary drop of cum leaked from the tip. He had fought off his orgasm but now his swollen balls ached, needing release. Sitting up, she moved onto all fours, crawled along the couch, bent and licked the drop of cum from the head of his cock. The touch of her tongue on his cock made him suck in his breath. Her mouth opened and she took him into it. He groaned as her mouth enveloped the head and slid down his quivering shaft. No sooner had she started she stopped, sliding her mouth off his cock, leaving it jerking with excitement and frustration. Sliding off the couch, she stood beside him, reaching down for his hand.“Time to fuck me.” she said in a husky voice. Taking her hand he rose up and she led him by the hand to the bedroom.“Oh shit! Fuck!” she cried out as the swollen head of his cock prized her open and his thick rigid shaft forced itself deep into her tight wet pussy. Gasping at the fullness of his cock inside her, she spread her legs as wide as she could, wanting him deep. Braced on his arms above her and filled with lust, he worked his hips, grunting and driving his glistening wet cock in and out of her until he felt it gripping him with pleasure. Driven wild with the sensations inside her pussy, she groaned loudly and gave a little squirt with every thrust, pushing herself up hard to meet each one.“Fuck it! Fuck it! Make it cum!” she pleaded, her pussy so close and desperate to cum. Almost there himself, he fucked her even harder, slamming himself between her legs, driving his cock between her parted lips into her warm wet pussy to the hilt.“Oh fuck! Yes! Yes!” She cried out, jerking on his cock as her pussy exploded between her legs, spraying them both with a huge squirt of wetness. The tight grip of her contracting pussy and sound of her cumming pushed him over the top and he felt the numbness and rush of cum start. Quickly he pulled out his jerking cock and with a roar sprayed thick ropes of cum all over her tits and stomach. Still hard and not waiting for her orgasm to subside, he pushed his cock back inside her. She yelped as he slid into her sensitive pussy but pain soon turned to pleasure as his hard thrusting cock sent her hurtling towards another orgasm. He gave a loud groan and pushed into her hard, cumming again, this time inside her. Feeling him cum inside her was enough and she came herself, her whole body quivering. He lay on top of her, both of them spent, breathing hard and enjoying the sensation of his cock softening inside her cum soaked pussy. Then they slept.He awoke the next morning cuddled up behind her, his hand cupping her breast. She seemed to be asleep but her nipple was hard under his fingers. He began fondling it and she moaned softly, her eyes still closed. Aroused, he began to run his hand over her naked body under the covers, his now hard cock pressed firmly against the crack of her behind. Reaching down under it, he ran his finger along the slit of her pussy, still slippery and wet with his cum. She moaned again as his finger slipped in between her lips and worked up to her clit. Rubbing it softly, he felt her body becoming aroused. Feeling his hard cock pressed behind her, she raised her top leg. He slid down and positioned himself and holding his cock, pushed the head into her warm wet pussy. Within minutes they were both cumming again, her pussy leaking another load of nice thick load of cum. She had never been fucked from behind on her side before, only on all fours. It was softer than the hard thrusting doggy ramming against her behind but she liked it a lot.Evident there was a definite attraction between them they decided later that morning over coffee that they would spend the weekend together. Maybe the saying about not fooling around at work parties wasn't a hundred percent true. They would see how the weekend went.by Bumpinguglies, for Literotica

A horny woman invents her own game to secure a seduction.by Bumpinguglies. - listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. They say it's not a good idea to fool around at the office Christmas party, a piece of advice she was deliberately choosing to ignore. Her decision had been made the moment he had walked in the door. Feeling horny and with a few drinks under her belt, she had decided right there and then that she was going to fuck him.Her plan was a simple one. Sitting on a sofa opposite where he was standing with his colleagues and knowing that any man couldn't resist looking up a woman's skirt, she casually kept uncrossing and crossing her legs, parting them just enough to keep giving him and only him a good look between her legs and the thin white strip of material nestled between her thighs. Her drink was on the coffee table and she also made sure he got full view of her ample breasts in her low cut dress each time she bent forward to pick it up. She smiled inwardly to herself as she spied him pretending not to notice but staring intently between her legs every time she moved them. She could feel his gaze burning into her panties and it made her pussy tingle and her nipples hard with excitement knowing what thoughts must be going through his mind and how arousing the sight of those panties were to him. She even suspected that the bulge in his pants had grown since she first saw it and the thought of it made her even more aroused. She could feel her pussy moistening inside her panties with every moment that passed and every look he gave them.Deciding he had looked enough, she got up off the couch and carrying her empty glass made to walk to the bar. As she passed him she stopped.“It's shaved and wet.” She whispered into his ear.“I'm sorry.” he asked, as if he hadn't heard her properly and at the same time shocked and embarrassed he had been caught out.“If you want a better look, meet me in my office upstairs in five minutes and bring that nice cock.” she told him and walked off, her hand casually brushing the front of his pants, enough for him to feel it but not enough for anyone else to notice.It was the longest five minutes of his life, standing there talking to his workmates with a stiffening cock in his pants and thoughts of her shaved pussy coursing through his mind. Excusing himself, he made straight for the elevator, his heart beating hard with anticipation.She sat on the corner of the desk in her dimly lit office counting down the seconds hoping he would take up her invitation. Like him, her heart was racing and her pussy ached with anticipation. She couldn't help reaching down and running her fingers over her panties, caressing her pussy through them, her fingertip pressing the material into the moist cleft between her lips.She heard the elevator ding and she jumped off the desk. Suddenly, he was there, his silhouette framed in the doorway against the well-lit outer office. They came together in the middle of the office and he kissed her passionately, his hands sliding up her outer thighs under her skirt. Breathing hard, she reached down and pressed her hand to his groin, feeling the hardness there. She fumbled with his zipper as his hand slid down inside her panties seeking out the wet pussy within. Her hand now inside his pants gripped his rigid throbbing cock as his fingers eagerly parted her silky wet lips and found her tingling hard clit. She groaned with pleasure and began to pull him as he rubbed her clit using her own wetness to lubricate it, quickly propelling her towards the orgasm her pussy craved. She pulled him faster as her arousal grew and grew and her legs opened wider and began to quiver. With a gasp she froze, gripping his cock tight, her whole body jerking as she came with a loud groan of pleasure. With his hard swollen cock sticking out the front of his pants leaking precum, he guided her backwards to the desk and made to pull down her panties. She stopped him.“No, not here.” she whispered, still recovering from her orgasm. As much as she wanted that hard cock inside her, for some reason she didn't want to do it there in the office.“Let's go back to mine.” She suggested. Reluctantly, he withdrew his hands from her panties and stuffed his aching swollen cock back in his pants. They kissed once more and made for the elevator hand in hand.When you are horny and desperate to fuck everything takes so long. That was the case with the cab ride to her place. In the darkened back of the cab she had rubbed the front of his trousers and he in turn had done the same over the front of her panties. It had made the cab ride seem longer but the thrill and excitement of their fondling and the level of arousal it created was worth it.Inside her apartment she decided to slow things down by pouring them both a drink. She wanted the night to last, not be over with quick five minute fuck. Reclined on one end of the couch with him sitting on the other end facing her, she reached down and pulled off her panties, threw them on the floor and spread her legs wide.“I said you would get a better look at it.” she said smiling. “What do you think? Does it make you hard?”“Fuck yes!” he groaned, starting at her gorgeous shaved pussy with its slightly parted pink glistening lips and dripping wet opening between them.“Would you like to taste it?” she asked, instantly making herself even wetter at the thought of what she just said. Without answering, he put down his drink, slid along the couch and bent between her legs. She was so wet and the musky smell of her pussy filled his nostrils inflaming his senses. Hungrily he began licking her, savoring the sweet taste of her pussy, his tongue rasping against her hard clit and delving into her saturated opening. She moaned and her head lolled back as his tongue sent waves of pleasure from her pussy right up through her entire body. Sensing she was about to cum he licked at her clit and flooded opening faster. With shaking legs she reached down, grasped the back of his head and crushed his face between her legs. She came with a huge groan, grinding her pussy up and down over his mouth.With a final few soft licks of her delicious pussy, he straightened back up, moved to the other end of the couch, retrieved his drink and took a long hard swig of it.“Let me see your cock.” She said, lying back with her drink back in hand and her legs still wide open. Once again replacing his drink, he undid his belt, pulled down his zipper and reached into his pants. His rigid cock almost sprung from them, the engorged head glistening with precum and the thick shaft throbbing with excitement.“Stroke it for me.” She commanded, staring at it longingly and imagining the feel of it inside her. Fuck, it was so nice and big. Taking his cock between thumb and fingertips he began to slowly stroke his cock, his gaze firmly between her legs as his hand moved up and down the rigid shaft. The sight of him pulling himself had her breathing heavily and her pussy wanting to cum again. Her eyes fixed on his hand and cock, she reached down and began to rub her clit. Watching her masturbating had his cock jerking with excitement in his hand. He groaned trying to block out the sensation of his hand on his cock. He didn't want to cum, couldn't cum, not before he had felt himself inside that gorgeous tight pussy. Stroking as slow as he could, he watched her rubbing get faster and then turn frantic until her pussy sprayed wetness over the couch between her legs as she came. The sight of her cumming and squirting pussy was sending him over the top. Desperately he squeezed the shaft of his cock to stave off his orgasm. He was on the very edge for what seemed like an eternity until it finally subsided. Releasing the grip on his cock, he watched as one solitary drop of cum leaked from the tip. He had fought off his orgasm but now his swollen balls ached, needing release. Sitting up, she moved onto all fours, crawled along the couch, bent and licked the drop of cum from the head of his cock. The touch of her tongue on his cock made him suck in his breath. Her mouth opened and she took him into it. He groaned as her mouth enveloped the head and slid down his quivering shaft. No sooner had she started she stopped, sliding her mouth off his cock, leaving it jerking with excitement and frustration. Sliding off the couch, she stood beside him, reaching down for his hand.“Time to fuck me.” she said in a husky voice. Taking her hand he rose up and she led him by the hand to the bedroom.“Oh shit! Fuck!” she cried out as the swollen head of his cock prized her open and his thick rigid shaft forced itself deep into her tight wet pussy. Gasping at the fullness of his cock inside her, she spread her legs as wide as she could, wanting him deep. Braced on his arms above her and filled with lust, he worked his hips, grunting and driving his glistening wet cock in and out of her until he felt it gripping him with pleasure. Driven wild with the sensations inside her pussy, she groaned loudly and gave a little squirt with every thrust, pushing herself up hard to meet each one.“Fuck it! Fuck it! Make it cum!” she pleaded, her pussy so close and desperate to cum. Almost there himself, he fucked her even harder, slamming himself between her legs, driving his cock between her parted lips into her warm wet pussy to the hilt.“Oh fuck! Yes! Yes!” She cried out, jerking on his cock as her pussy exploded between her legs, spraying them both with a huge squirt of wetness. The tight grip of her contracting pussy and sound of her cumming pushed him over the top and he felt the numbness and rush of cum start. Quickly he pulled out his jerking cock and with a roar sprayed thick ropes of cum all over her tits and stomach. Still hard and not waiting for her orgasm to subside, he pushed his cock back inside her. She yelped as he slid into her sensitive pussy but pain soon turned to pleasure as his hard thrusting cock sent her hurtling towards another orgasm. He gave a loud groan and pushed into her hard, cumming again, this time inside her. Feeling him cum inside her was enough and she came herself, her whole body quivering. He lay on top of her, both of them spent, breathing hard and enjoying the sensation of his cock softening inside her cum soaked pussy. Then they slept.He awoke the next morning cuddled up behind her, his hand cupping her breast. She seemed to be asleep but her nipple was hard under his fingers. He began fondling it and she moaned softly, her eyes still closed. Aroused, he began to run his hand over her naked body under the covers, his now hard cock pressed firmly against the crack of her behind. Reaching down under it, he ran his finger along the slit of her pussy, still slippery and wet with his cum. She moaned again as his finger slipped in between her lips and worked up to her clit. Rubbing it softly, he felt her body becoming aroused. Feeling his hard cock pressed behind her, she raised her top leg. He slid down and positioned himself and holding his cock, pushed the head into her warm wet pussy. Within minutes they were both cumming again, her pussy leaking another load of nice thick load of cum. She had never been fucked from behind on her side before, only on all fours. It was softer than the hard thrusting doggy ramming against her behind but she liked it a lot.Evident there was a definite attraction between them they decided later that morning over coffee that they would spend the weekend together. Maybe the saying about not fooling around at work parties wasn't a hundred percent true. They would see how the weekend went.by Bumpinguglies, for Literotica

Dylan Cleaver & Paul Ford join Jason Hoyte for another episode of NZ's #1 cricket pod, the BYC! In this episode, the guys review the Black Caps' performance in the T20s against Sri Lanka, especially from the newbies (0:00), before previewing the ODI Series (14:35). Then the guys discuss the upcoming Test Series against BazBall (20:17), Pakistan beating the Aussies and the punishing return of Davy Dumb Dumb (23:32).Also, they go around the grounds of the Plunkett Shield (32:12). Plus, all your favourite BYC segments ‘Who Am I' (36:15), 'News Or Ruse' (40:34) and 'Cricket Violence Corner' (47:10).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Auburn's men's basketball team had to turn its plane around because teammates were fighting on the plane and Bruce Pearl is getting props after they went out and won. You know who is not getting props? Lionel Messi. His Inter Miami Herons crashed out of the MLS Playoffs in disastrous fashion to Atlanta United and Greg Cote and Mike Ryan break down what went wrong. Luis Suárez shoved Team USA legend Brad Guzman (as Dan calls him) into the net after scoring a goal and it was uproariously funny. After that, we run through more football storylines including Deebo Samuel choking the San Francisco 49ers' long snapper, the Detroit Lions' great comeback win over the Houston Texans, Carson Beck stinking without Brock Bowers and Ladd McConkey, and the New York Jets losing in epic fashion to the Arizona Cardinals. Plus, Chris Cote shares a poem about the Miami Hurricanes that leads us down a steamy path. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ethan has tales from the USA to tell, McGrath's dad brings a mysterious bag to the hospital and Ollie replaces the absent Smith. Join our Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/sloppyjoespodcast We have merch! https://sloppyjoespod.com YOU NEED OUR HELP? Send in your advice question to: SloppyJoesPodcast@gmail.com Find us: twitter.com/SloppyJoesPod tiktok.com/@sloppyjoespodcast https://www.instagram.com/thesloppyjoespod/?hl=en Presenters: Joe Smith: https://twitter.com/Joesmith93 Joe McGrath: https://twitter.com/RadioJoeM Dom:  @DommyBW   Ethan James: https://twitter.com/EthanJamesMedia #sloppyjoes #comedy #food #foodreview

For research purposes, Brian needs to get turned on right now.  Chicago's best morning radio show now has a podcast! Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and remember that the conversation always lives on the Q101 Facebook page.  Brian & Kenzie are live every morning from 6a-10a on Q101.    Subscribe to our channel HERE: https://www.youtube.com/@Q101 Like Q101 on Facebook HERE: https://www.facebook.com/q101chicago Follow Q101 on Twitter HERE: https://twitter.com/Q101Chicago Follow Q101 on Instagram HERE: https://www.instagram.com/q101chicago/?hl=en Follow Q101 on TikTok HERE: https://www.tiktok.com/@q101chicago?lang=enSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Aroused dolphins, clever baby whales, sperm whale attacks and more! Adam talks about all things whales and dolphins, based off a listener '“call in”.

Questions answered this episode: I'm dating a wonderful man. I'm very sensitive to physical touch and get aroused very easily. Even holding hands results in arousal. Do you have any advice? Is it okay to keep showing those displays of affection even though they are accompanied by arousal? Why is it a mortal sin to receive the Eucharist in a state of sin? Is the Lord not seeking for us to receive him even when we're separated from him? Do you have any advice for raising children to feel comfortable refraining from the Eucharist without fear of judgment from those around them? I hear so many religious people saying we should get married young. I'll be 32 soon but I long for marriage. Should I give up on what I so desperately want because of people who clearly know about this topic? Ask Christopher West is a weekly podcast in which Theology of the Body Institute President Christopher West and his beloved wife Wendy share their humor and wisdom, answering questions about marriage, relationships, life, and the Catholic faith, all in light of John Paul II's beautiful teachings on the Theology of the Body.

"There is nothing inherently wrong with an aroused man." What is arousal? Why is it good? Sam Jolman helps us reclaim the heart of masculine sexuality for the purpose of awe, play, and worshipping God. You'll learn how arousal always has a script, why evil hates arousal, and the difference between sexuality and sensuality. At the end, you'll receive a beautiful blessing from Sam. This episode is amazing!Sam Jolman (MA, LPC) is a trauma therapist with over twenty years of experience specializing in men's issues and sexual trauma recovery. His writing flows out of this unique opportunity to help people know and heal their stories, and find greater sexual wholeness and aliveness. He received his master's in counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary and was further trained in Narrative Focused Trauma Care through the Allender Center at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. Sam lives in Colorado with his wife and three sons. Fun fact: Sam and Drew attend the same church!Buy Sam's new book (paid link):The Sex Talk You Never Got: Reclaiming the Heart of Masculine SexualityJoin Sam's newsletter for a free copy of the first chapter: samjolman.substack.comLearn more and connect with Sam at samjolman.comTake the Husband Material Journey... Step 1: Listen to this podcast or watch on YouTube Step 2: Join the private Husband Material Community Step 3: Take the free mini-course: How To Outgrow Porn Step 4: Try the all-in-one program: Husband Material Academy Thanks for listening!

A new MP3 sermon from Jon Jacobs/Grace Presbyterian Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: Romans 7:1-12 Aroused by the Law Subtitle: Romans Speaker: Dr. Jon Jacobs Broadcaster: Jon Jacobs/Grace Presbyterian Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/19/2024 Bible: Romans 7:1-12; Ezekiel 20 Length: 49 min.

Lynnie, Shantal and Gary are back for another spicy Q/A! Do women genuinely think their guy friends are just their friends? Are they fucking brothers or brothers they would fuck? Do women ever get randomly aroused in public?  Plus Gary helps answer some questions the ladies are dying to know the answers too about reacting to how a woman's p*ssy tastes. Submit your own questions & stories at coffeeandcleavage.com.

Episode 1447 - Brought to you by: Bespoke Post - Get a free Mystery Gift with your first monthly shipment when you sign up at https://BoxOfAwesome.com and enter the code ‘hardfactor' at checkout. LASARA Weight Loss Therapy - Generic Ozempic that you can get 10% off by going to https://bit.ly/HARDFACTOR, AND 10% Off Testosterone Replacement Therapy nationwide by going to https://Lasara.com/HardFactor (00:00:30) Teasers! (00:02:21) UK man with foot-long penis goes on wine tour after being barred from yoga class (00:16:29) Supreme Court weighs bans on sleeping outside amid rise in homelessness Freaks (00:19:53) Belgian man with rare condition cleared of DUI after proving his body makes its own alcohol (00:21:59) Man suffers 100 orgasms A DAY for two years (00:25:11) Woman with two vaginas and other medical conditions is permanently aroused (00:28:27) Wild Mugshot: Trans sex offender busted trying to abduct child playing outside Colorado elementary school (00:33:19) Robot Butlers: The Future or the end? (00:37:19) 9-year-old 'Seagull Boy' wins European seagull screeching competition

In today's episode of 5 Minutes of Peace by ThePeaceRoom, a passage from "The Heart Aroused" by David Whyte.This reflects on the transformative journey of midlife. As the body changes, so do the mind and heart, altering perceptions and priorities. The narrator explores the inner conflict between professional duties and personal desires, urging listeners to heed the call for a more authentic life. Through vivid imagery and introspective narration, the passage resonates with those navigating the complexities of midlife transitions. Join ThePeaceRoom on the path of love, service, and peace, and visit our website for more information on Reiki treatments and healing sessions.

This episode we delve into the concept of the "Window of Tolerance" and its profound implications for emotional regulation and well-being. In this insightful discussion, Eva and Ben explore how our nervous system responds to stress and adversity, and how the window of tolerance serves as a framework for understanding our capacity to cope with life's challenges. Eva provides invaluable insights into what's behind the window of tolerance, shedding light on how trauma, stress, and past experiences shape our ability to regulate emotions and navigate difficult situations. From practical strategies for expanding our window of tolerance to the importance of self-awareness and self-compassion, this episode offers a holistic approach to fostering resilience and healing. Listen in as we uncover the keys to cultivating a wider window of tolerance, enhancing emotional resilience, and reclaiming agency over our lives. Whether you're navigating personal challenges or seeking to support others on their journey, this episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in deepening their understanding of mental health and well-being.Join us for an enlightening episode as we delve into the concept of the "Window of Tolerance" and its profound implications for emotional regulation and well-being. In this insightful discussion, we explore how our nervous system responds to stress and adversity, and how the window of tolerance serves as a framework for understanding our capacity to cope with life's challenges. To learn more about the Sex, God, & Chaos team, click the link below: www.sexgodchaos.com Looking for help? Book an appointment with LifeWorks Counseling today: www.lifeworks.ms You can purchase your copy of Sex, God, & Chaos here: www.amazon.com

The condition we're going to talk about today is pretty rare. It affects around 1% of women, but it can really disrupt the lives of those who suffer from it. Persistent genital arousal disorder, or PGAD for short, was officially identified by the medical community back in 2001, when Sandra Leiblum and Sharon Nathan published an article about it in The Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy. At the time, they called it persistent genital arousal syndrome, and identified five specific criteria for diagnosis.  These were then expanded by the International Society for the Study of Women's Sexual Health in 2021. According to that organisation, PGAD refers to “persistent or recurrent, unwanted or intrusive, distressing sensations of genital arousal”. It is “most commonly experienced in the clitoris but also in other genito-pelvic regions” and “may include other types of genito-pelvic dysesthesia” like buzzing, tingling, burning, twitching, itch or pain.” The minimum duration for a diagnosis is 3 months. Are you saying it's like having a constant orgasm? So where does it actually come from then? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the last episodes, you can click here: Why are we afraid of the dark? Why do people consider the number seven lucky? Why do we get moles? A podcast written and realised by Joseph Chance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This video will help improve your dating life quickly. Attract and Keep ANY women you want using 'MBT' Below!

Crafty county commissioners tried to rig the bidding so their favorite bid, padded to the tune of half a million 1924 dollars, would win —but they didn't move quite fast enough. Three months later, they'd all been thrown out of office. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1920s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1303d-bridge-scandal-aroused-fury-of-1920s-portland.html)

ACC Head G Lane joins Manaia Stewart to recap the final day of the Test match between the Black Caps and Australia as we bid farewell to the Summer Of Cricket (2:30). Then we take a trip in the 'Hot Take Time Machine' as Super Rugby Chair Kevin Malloy raises something they fellas have been preaching for some time (14:19)! Finally, the team gets to your feedback in another rousing round of 'Yours Please' (22:20) and mop up the top stories of the day (25:15)...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

BENNIFER 4EVA! Jessi was moved to TEARS (and AROUSED) watching the new Jlo & Ben Affleck documentary “The Greatest Love Story Never Told”, Pitbull is opening a restaurant in a Walmart, Trayvis Swelce spent a romantic day at … The ZOO? And Beyonce might be facing legal action from Franklin The Turtle… But does “Texas Hold ‘Em” sound like the “Franklin” theme song? Jessi lets YOU, The PEOPLE decide. Then, make sure you're wearing underpants, because the Paparazzi is here! Jessi revisits the time she went on on a STAKEOUT with NYC Paparazzi Cesar Pena. As they wait for Ashley Olsen to emerge with her new baby, Jessi asks him EVERYTHING she has ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW. How does he know where famous people are? What is the most money he's made off a single photo? Which celebrities call him? Which celebrities swear at him? Cesar TELLS ALL. GRAB THE FINAL TICKETS TO JESSI'S MARCH 9th STAND UP COMEDY TAPING: https://www.ticketmaster.ca/jessi-cruickshank-tickets/artist/2734331Your Voicemails give us LIIIIIFE! Leave them anytime about ANYTHING, here: 323-448-0068 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ep 406: Gas Station Hookup, When Stopping for Candy Brings Satisfaction Way More than Satisfying a Sweet Tooth, a short erotic fiction story infused with dribblings of romance. She was at a low point having several disasters suddenly plague her life, he offered kindness and a hug. Aroused by his kindness, his hug, and his tangible arousal, she desired to get even more comfort from an orgasm. so, she simply asked. Things swelled to a delicious level after that, and they found a place to get busy. What do you think? Would you give a person an orgasm in a hookup if they simply asked because they wanted to feel better? And this is the only the beginning...Last day to vote! Please vote for me in the Golden Pigtails erotica awards! Ruan Willow (Dressing Room Domme) by 2/29/24 7 pm ET: https://alexasommers.com/the-golden-pigtails-2002-finals-5/All Ruan's Books: https://books.ruanwillowauthor.com/NEW RELEASES!Shared Wife at the Con: Watching Her Take It (Itty Bitty Vixen) https://books.ruanwillowauthor.com/sharedhotwifeattheconaudiobookGet Ruan's new audiobook narrated with narrator Nathan Fultz: The Sugar Daddies: https://books.ruanwillowauthor.com/thesugardaddiesaudiobookIn ebook, paperback, and audiobook: https://books.ruanwillowauthor.com/thesugardaddiesBUY BOOKS DIRECTLY FROM RUAN HERE: https://books.ruanwillowauthor.com/buybooksdirectlyfromruanFRI3NDS WITH B3N3FITS: A Spicy Four Short Story Adventure in Ebook and paperback, coming soon in audiobook!  https://books.ruanwillowauthor.com/friendswithbenefitsebookEnjoy this erotica fiction short story, with a splash of erotic romance entertainment! Make sure you come today and enjoy yourself, and your body! And enjoy this story of erotic fiction arts for you self care and enjoyment! Make sure you nourish your relationship with yourself, your libido, your sexuality, and your partner (if you have one, and if you don't, that's okay, just make sure you find ways to enjoy your sexuality and marinate in it!)Tuesdays: Erotic romance/erotica fictionFridays: Sexuality experts/personality interviewsPlease subscribe to and share my podcast! Please give me a review!Join the exclusive level for the padlocked episodes for $3 a month. Give it a try, and cancel anytime.Take care!Love ya,RuanJOYMODE, a Natural Sexual Performance Booster. Get 20% off + FREE shipping with code ruan20 at https://usejoymode.com/ruan20 Support the showSubscribe for exclusive episodes: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1599808/subscribeSign up for Ruan's newsletters: https://subscribepage.io/ruanwillowhttps://linktr.ee/RuanWillowRuan's a Manscaped Ambassador get 20% OFF+Free Shipping with promo code RUANWILLOW20 at https://www.manscaped.com/

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The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Hi My loves I am back. A lot has happened in the past year but I think its time I revamp the podcast. Are you In? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blue-riddley/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blue-riddley/support

Michael has a story about people who are sexually aroused all the time.

It's your Ill-Advised New, the stupid criminals of the day.   Support the show and follow us here Twitter, Insta, Apple, Amazon, Spotify and the Edge! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We go socks off and uncut on Tuesday. Cass faces some criticism head on while Anthony says goodbye to something from his childhood. We get weird with booty dope, and a woman who cops described as “angry and aroused”. We air out some Facebook couple drama, help Connor in the urn, puke penis, and tripping balls and seeing baby bears. We unveil the latest tech from the CES in Vegas, discuss the college chancellor in hot water, and tree lady got arrested again. We ponder the uptick in underground lairs, attempt to find a volunteer for pit sacrifice, and remind you to come party with us for our anniversary party!   Support the show and follow us here Twitter, Insta, Apple, Amazon, Spotify and the Edge! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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12.14.23 Kevin condemns listeners who get "aroused" by other teams winning to help the Commanders draft position. 

Jeremy, Boss, and Sallie sow before they reap, open Ron Jeremy's vault, knock knees like a hurricane, and never forgive or forget as they discuss Mark Davis's Amber Aroused.

Let's talk about hormones. Hormones are so much more than time packages that influence the major events in our lives. We are still learning about some of these major events though in ourselves and other animals. Just a few months again scientists confirmed that chimpanzees go through menopause Here is the NY Times article about the discovery. I was also keen to see the study on chimpanzees since it was research conducted in Kibale National Park in Uganda. Now I want to know if mountain gorillas go through menopause, I have been to Kibale many times and have followed research by John Mitani, David Watts, and Richard Wrangham for quite a long time. Here is a link to the original research article. In this episode I mention a video I made with a friend and colleague called “Rejecting the Biological Binary". You can check that out here on my Youtube channel Wild Connection TV This week's guest is Randi Hutter Epstein, MD. Shes a writer in residence at Yale School of Medicine and teaches both at Yale University and Columbia's School of Journalism. Today, she is filling us in on all the weird and wonderful things that hormones control by talking about her book Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything. They even, well, make you you, mostly, kind of. If you want to get your copy of Aroused and Randi's other book check out her website: http://randihutterepstein.com/ And if you want to keep up with Randi follow her on  Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn If you are digging the show subscribe and share it so others can enjoy it too. You can follow the show on Itunes, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also follow the show on Twitter: @WildConnectPod You can also follow me on  Twitter: @realdrjen Instagram: @readrjen Facebook https://www.facebook.com/RealDrJen YouTube: Wild Connection TV

Andy, Randy, and Abe chat about doing some advance Back Friday shopping, holiday plans, and true fans. 

  The Haunter of the Dark By H. P. Lovecraft (Dedicated to Robert Bloch) I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim— Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name. —Nemesis. Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but Nature has shewn herself capable of many freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the deserted church on Federal Hill—the shrewd analyst is not slow in attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at least some of which Blake was secretly connected. For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city—a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst death and flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection. Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake's diary at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to 1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and—above all—the look of monstrous, transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It was one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box found in the old church steeple—the black windowless steeple, and not the tower where Blake's diary said those things originally were. Though widely censured both officially and unofficially, this man—a reputable physician with a taste for odd folklore—averred that he had rid the earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it. Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself. The papers have given the tangible details from a sceptical angle, leaving for others the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw it—or thought he saw it—or pretended to see it. Now, studying the diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarise the dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief actor. Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934–5, taking the upper floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off College Street—on the crest of the great eastward hill near the Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay Library. It was a cosy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof, classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the other earmarks of early nineteenth-century workmanship. Inside were six-panelled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase, white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below the general level. Blake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side, while its west windows—before one of which he had his desk—faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town's outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside's purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter it in person. Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique furniture suitable to his quarters and settled down to write and paint—living alone, and attending to the simple housework himself. His studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof furnished admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five of his best-known short stories—“The Burrower Beneath”, “The Stairs in the Crypt”, “Shaggai”, “In the Vale of Pnath”, and “The Feaster from the Stars”—and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes. At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at the outspread west—the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below, the Georgian court-house belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the downtown section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distance whose unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy. From his few local acquaintances he learned that the far-off slope was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnants of older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house. Even with optical aid Federal Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous, and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake's own tales and pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded into the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night grotesque. Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest on especially high ground; for the grimy facade, and the obliquely seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century and more. The style, so far as the glass could shew, was that earliest experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn period and held over some of the outlines and proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815. As months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure with an oddly mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed the faintest notion of what the church was or had been. In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his long-planned novel—based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in Maine—but was strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more he would sit at his westward window and gaze at the distant hill and the black, frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new beauty, but Blake's restlessness was merely increased. It was then that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream. Late in April, just before the aeon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made his first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown streets and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon the ascending avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches, and blear-paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the long-known, unreachable world beyond the mists. There were dingy blue-and-white street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a dream-world never to be trod by living human feet. Now and then a battered church facade or crumbling spire came in sight, but never the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a shopkeeper about a great stone church the man smiled and shook his head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed higher, the region seemed stranger and stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He crossed two or three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower. Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The dark man's face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake saw him make a curious sign with his right hand. Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his left, above the tiers of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it through the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Twice he lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or housewives who sat on their doorsteps, or any of the children who shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes. At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge stone bulk rose darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in a windswept open square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for upon the wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported—a separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding streets—there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake's new perspective, was beyond dispute. The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high stone buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows were largely unbroken, though many of the stone mullions were missing. Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have survived so well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The massive doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose gate—at the head of a flight of steps from the square—was visibly padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and in the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of the dimly sinister beyond his power to define. There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman at the northerly end and approached him with questions about the church. He was a great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he would do little more than make the sign of the cross and mutter that people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said very hurriedly that the Italian priests warned everybody against it, vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark. He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled certain sounds and rumours from his boyhood. There had been a bad sect there in the ould days—an outlaw sect that called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did be those who said that merely the light could do it. If Father O'Malley were alive there would be many the thing he could tell. But now there was nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after the threatening talk in '77, when people began to mind the way folks vanished now and then in the neighbourhood. Some day the city would step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would come of anybody's touching it. Better it be left alone for the years to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest forever in their black abyss. After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled pile. It excited him to find that the structure seemed as sinister to others as to him, and he wondered what grain of truth might lie behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were mere legends evoked by the evil look of the place, but even so, they were like a strange coming to life of one of his own stories. The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed unable to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that towered on its high plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had not touched the brown, withered growths in the raised, iron-fenced yard. Blake found himself edging nearer the raised area and examining the bank wall and rusted fence for possible avenues of ingress. There was a terrible lure about the blackened fane which was not to be resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but around on the north side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk around on the narrow coping outside the fence till he came to the gap. If the people feared the place so wildly, he would encounter no interference. He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone noticed him. Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square edging away and making the same sign with their right hands that the shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several windows were slammed down, and a fat woman darted into the street and pulled some small children inside a rickety, unpainted house. The gap in the fence was very easy to pass through, and before long Blake found himself wading amidst the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here and there the worn stump of a headstone told him that there had once been burials in this field; but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The sheer bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it, but he conquered his mood and approached to try the three great doors in the facade. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit of the Cyclopean building in quest of some minor and more penetrable opening. Even then he could not be sure that he wished to enter that haunt of desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him on automatically. A yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the needed aperture. Peering in, Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs and dust faintly litten by the western sun's filtered rays. Debris, old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts met his eye, though over everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all sharp outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air furnace shewed that the building had been used and kept in shape as late as mid-Victorian times. Acting almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the window and let himself down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strown concrete floor. The vaulted cellar was a vast one, without partitions; and in a corner far to the right, amid dense shadows, he saw a black archway evidently leading upstairs. He felt a peculiar sense of oppression at being actually within the great spectral building, but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about—finding a still-intact barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to the open window to provide for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the wide, cobweb-festooned space toward the arch. Half choked with the omnipresent dust, and covered with ghostly gossamer fibres, he reached and began to climb the worn stone steps which rose into the darkness. He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands. After a sharp turn he felt a closed door ahead, and a little fumbling revealed its ancient latch. It opened inward, and beyond it he saw a dimly illumined corridor lined with worm-eaten panelling. Once on the ground floor, Blake began exploring in a rapid fashion. All the inner doors were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room to room. The colossal nave was an almost eldritch place with its drifts and mountains of dust over box pews, altar, hourglass pulpit, and sounding-board, and its titanic ropes of cobweb stretching among the pointed arches of the gallery and entwining the clustered Gothic columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous leaden light as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange, half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows. The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake could scarcely decipher what they had represented, but from the little he could make out he did not like them. The designs were largely conventional, and his knowledge of obscure symbolism told him much concerning some of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore expressions distinctly open to criticism, while one of the windows seemed to shew merely a dark space with spirals of curious luminosity scattered about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake noticed that the cobwebbed cross above the altar was not of the ordinary kind, but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt. In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and ceiling-high shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the first time he received a positive shock of objective horror, for the titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbidden things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulae which have trickled down the stream of time from the days of man's youth, and the dim, fabulous days before man was. He had himself read many of them—a Latin version of the abhorred Necronomicon, the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous Cultes des Goules of Comte d'Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish De Vermis Mysteriis. But there were others he had known merely by reputation or not at all—the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of Dzyan, and a crumbling volume in wholly unidentifiable characters yet with certain symbols and diagrams shudderingly recognisable to the occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumours had not lied. This place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe. In the ruined desk was a small leather-bound record-book filled with entries in some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing consisted of the common traditional symbols used today in astronomy and anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts—the devices of the sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs—here massed in solid pages of text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that each symbol answered to some alphabetical letter. In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this volume in his coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some later time. He wondered how they could have remained undisturbed so long. Was he the first to conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which had for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place from visitors? Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake ploughed again through the dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he had seen a door and staircase presumably leading up to the blackened tower and steeple—objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The ascent was a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders had done their worst in this constricted place. The staircase was a spiral with high, narrow wooden treads, and now and then Blake passed a clouded window looking dizzily out over the city. Though he had seen no ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of bells in the tower whose narrow, louver-boarded lancet windows his field-glass had studied so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment; for when he attained the top of the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and clearly devoted to vastly different purposes. The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet windows, one on each side, which were glazed within their screening of decayed louver-boards. These had been further fitted with tight, opaque screens, but the latter were now largely rotted away. In the centre of the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar some four feet in height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely incised, and wholly unrecognisable hieroglyphs. On this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind them, ranging along the dark-panelled walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading up to the closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above. As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs on the strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to clear the dust away with his hands and handkerchief, and saw that the figurings were of a monstrous and utterly alien kind; depicting entities which, though seemingly alive, resembled no known life-form ever evolved on this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere turned out to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedron with many irregular flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort, or an artificial object of carved and highly polished mineral matter. It did not touch the bottom of the box, but was held suspended by means of a metal band around its centre, with seven queerly designed supports extending horizontally to angles of the box's inner wall near the top. This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake an almost alarming fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he looked at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with half-formed worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated pictures of alien orbs with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains and no mark of life, and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses told of the presence of consciousness and will. When he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of dust in the far corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just why it took his attention he could not tell, but something in its contours carried a message to his unconscious mind. Ploughing toward it, and brushing aside the hanging cobwebs as he went, he began to discern something grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake gasped with a baffling mixture of emotions. It was a human skeleton, and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothing was in shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke a man's grey suit. There were other bits of evidence—shoes, metal clasps, huge buttons for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter's badge with the name of the old Providence Telegram, and a crumbling leather pocketbook. Blake examined the latter with care, finding within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising calendar for 1893, some cards with the name “Edwin M. Lillibridge”, and a paper covered with pencilled memoranda. This paper held much of a puzzling nature, and Blake read it carefully at the dim westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases as the following: “Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844—buys old Free-Will Church in July—his archaeological work & studies in occult well known.” “Dr. Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against Starry Wisdom in sermon Dec. 29, 1844.” “Congregation 97 by end of '45.” “1846—3 disappearances—first mention of Shining Trapezohedron.” “7 disappearances 1848—stories of blood sacrifice begin.” “Investigation 1853 comes to nothing—stories of sounds.” “Fr. O'Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian ruins—says they call up something that can't exist in light. Flees a little light, and banished by strong light. Then has to be summoned again. Probably got this from deathbed confession of Francis X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in '49. These people say the Shining Trapezohedron shews them heaven & other worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way.” “Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the crystal, & have a secret language of their own.” “200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front.” “Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan's disappearance.” “Veiled article in J. March 14, '72, but people don't talk about it.” “6 disappearances 1876—secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle.” “Action promised Feb. 1877—church closes in April.” “Gang—Federal Hill Boys—threaten Dr. —— and vestrymen in May.” “181 persons leave city before end of '77—mention no names.” “Ghost stories begin around 1880—try to ascertain truth of report that no human being has entered church since 1877.” “Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851.” . . . Restoring the paper to the pocketbook and placing the latter in his coat, Blake turned to look down at the skeleton in the dust. The implications of the notes were clear, and there could be no doubt but that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two years before in quest of a newspaper sensation which no one else had been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of his plan—who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper. Had some bravely suppressed fear risen to overcome him and bring on sudden heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their peculiar state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed oddly dissolved at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with vague suggestions of charring. This charring extended to some of the fragments of clothing. The skull was in a very peculiar state—stained yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some powerful acid had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not imagine. Before he realised it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting its curious influence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw processions of robed, hooded figures whose outlines were not human, and looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching monoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea, and vortices of space where wisps of black mist floated before thin shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an infinite gulf of darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know. Then all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing, indeterminate panic fear. Blake choked and turned away from the stone, conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and watching him with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with something—something which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at him—something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his nerves—as well it might in view of his gruesome find. The light was waning, too, and since he had no illuminant with him he knew he would have to be leaving soon. It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a faint trace of luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried to look away from it, but some obscure compulsion drew his eyes back. Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing? What was it that the dead man's notes had said concerning a Shining Trapezohedron? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil? What had been done here, and what might still be lurking in the bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an elusive touch of foetor had arisen somewhere close by, though its source was not apparent. Blake seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It moved easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably glowing stone. At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come from the steeple's eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door. Rats, without question—the only living things to reveal their presence in this accursed pile since he had entered it. And yet that stirring in the steeple frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave, into the vaulted basement, out amidst the gathering dusk of the deserted square, and down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal Hill toward the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks of the college district. During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition. Instead, he read much in certain books, examined long years of newspaper files downtown, and worked feverishly at the cryptogram in that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soon saw, was no simple one; and after a long period of endeavour he felt sure that its language could not be English, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he would have to draw upon the deepest wells of his strange erudition. Every evening the old impulse to gaze westward returned, and he saw the black steeple as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and half-fabulous world. But now it held a fresh note of terror for him. He knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and with the knowledge his vision ran riot in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning, and as he watched their sunset flights he fancied they avoided the gaunt, lone spire as never before. When a flock of them approached it, he thought, they would wheel and scatter in panic confusion—and he could guess at the wild twitterings which failed to reach him across the intervening miles. It was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the cryptogram. The text was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent about what Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and disconcerted by his results. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices. Some of Blake's entries shew fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the street-lights form a bulwark which cannot be crossed. Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver's spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind. Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake's entries, though in so brief and casual a way that only the diary has called general attention to their contribution. It appears that a new fear had been growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered the dreaded church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and called on their priests to banish an entity which haunted their dreams. Something, they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were dark enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing local superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background of the horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no antiquarians. In writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the same time, however, he displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid longing—pervading even his dreams—to visit the accursed tower and gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone. Then something in the Journal on the morning of July 17 threw the diarist into a veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the other half-humorous items about the Federal Hill restlessness, but to Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm had put the city's lighting-system out of commission for a full hour, and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing in the steeple had taken advantage of the street-lamps' absence and gone down into the body of the church, flopping and bumping around in a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Toward the last it had bumped up to the tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It could go wherever the darkness reached, but light would always send it fleeing. When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion in the tower, for even the feeble light trickling through the grime-blackened, louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing. It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in time—for a long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour praying crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles and lamps somehow shielded with folded paper and umbrellas—a guard of light to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness. Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled hideously. But even this was not the worst. That evening in the Bulletin Blake read of what the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical news value of the scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds of Italians and crawled into the church through the cellar window after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule and of the spectral nave ploughed up in a singular way, with bits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There was a bad odour everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above, they found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean. In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They spoke of the heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs, and the bizarre plaster images; though strangely enough the metal box and the old mutilated skeleton were not mentioned. What disturbed Blake the most—except for the hints of stains and charring and bad odours—was the final detail that explained the crashing glass. Every one of the tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of them had been darkened in a crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces between the slanting exterior louver-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair lay scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been interrupted in the act of restoring the tower to the absolute blackness of its tightly curtained days. Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to the windowless spire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the horizontally sliding trap-door, and shot a feeble flashlight beam into the black and strangely foetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and an heterogeneous litter of shapeless fragments near the aperture. The verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given by the reporters. From this point onward Blake's diary shews a mounting tide of insidious horror and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for not doing something, and speculates wildly on the consequences of another electrical breakdown. It has been verified that on three occasions—during thunderstorms—he telephoned the electric light company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions against a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries shew concern over the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower room. He assumed that these things had been removed—whither, and by whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple—that monstrous thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and stare out of the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy rapport in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College Hill toward the west. Again and again he dwells on the fact that the thing in the steeple knows where to find him. The week following July 30 is recalled as the time of Blake's partial breakdown. He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone. Visitors remarked the cords he kept near his bed, and he said that sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles every night with knots which would probably hold or else waken him with the labour of untying. In his diary he told of the hideous experience which had brought the collapse. After retiring on the night of the 30th he had suddenly found himself groping about in an almost black space. All he could see were short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light, but he could smell an overpowering foetor and hear a curious jumble of soft, furtive sounds above him. Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at each noise there would come a sort of answering sound from above—a vague stirring, mixed with the cautious sliding of wood on wood. Once his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top, whilst later he found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built into the wall, and fumbling his uncertain way upward toward some region of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him. Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal images played, all of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws. Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and roused him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he never knew—perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron saints, or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber that encompassed him. He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the narrow spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn. There was a nightmare flight through a vast cobwebbed nave whose ghostly arches reached up to realms of leering shadow, a sightless scramble through a littered basement, a climb to regions of air and street-lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall black towers, and up the steep eastward precipice to his own ancient door. On regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on his study floor fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every inch of his body seemed sore and bruised. When he faced the mirror he saw that his hair was badly scorched, while a trace of strange, evil odour seemed to cling to his upper outer clothing. It was then that his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging exhaustedly about in a dressing-gown, he did little but stare from his west window, shiver at the threat of thunder, and make wild entries in his diary. The great storm broke just before midnight on August 8th. Lightning struck repeatedly in all parts of the city, and two remarkable fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential, while a constant fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting system, and tried to telephone the company around 1 a.m., though by that time service had been temporarily cut off in the interest of safety. He recorded everything in his diary—the large, nervous, and often undecipherable hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and of entries scrawled blindly in the dark. He had to keep the house dark in order to see out the window, and it appears that most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously through the rain across the glistening miles of downtown roofs at the constellation of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he would fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached phrases such as “The lights must not go”; “It knows where I am”; “I must destroy it”; and “It is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury this time”; are found scattered down two of the pages. Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2:12 a.m. according to power-house records, but Blake's diary gives no indication of the time. The entry is merely, “Lights out—God help me.” On Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked knots of men paraded the square and alleys around the evil church with umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns, crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts common to southern Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made cryptical signs of fear with their right hands when a turn in the storm caused the flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind blew out most of the candles, so that the scene grew threateningly dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church, and he hastened to the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables he could. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower, there could be no doubt whatever. For what happened at 2:35 we have the testimony of the priest, a young, intelligent, and well-educated person; of Patrolman William J. Monahan of the Central Station, an officer of the highest reliability who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the crowd; and of most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church's high bank wall—especially those in the square where the eastward facade was visible. Of course there was nothing which can be proved as being outside the order of Nature. The possible causes of such an event are many. No one can speak with certainty of the obscure chemical processes arising in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted building of heterogeneous contents. Mephitic vapours—spontaneous combustion—pressure of gases born of long decay—any one of numberless phenomena might be responsible. And then, of course, the factor of conscious charlatanry can by no means be excluded. The thing was really quite simple in itself, and covered less than three minutes of actual time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch repeatedly. It started with a definite swelling of the dull fumbling sounds inside the black tower. There had for some time been a vague exhalation of strange, evil odours from the church, and this had now become emphatic and offensive. Then at last there was a sound of splintering wood, and a large, heavy object crashed down in the yard beneath the frowning easterly facade. The tower was invisible now that the candles would not burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it was the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that tower's east window. Immediately afterward an utterly unbearable foetor welled forth from the unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers, and almost prostrating those in the square. At the same time the air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden east-blowing wind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellas of the crowd. Nothing definite could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-looking spectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser blackness against the inky sky—something like a formless cloud of smoke that shot with meteor-like speed toward the east. That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and discomfort, and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at all. Not knowing what had happened, they did not relax their vigil; and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated lightning, followed by an earsplitting crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in fifteen minutes more the street-lights sprang on again, sending the weary, bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes. The next day's papers gave these matters minor mention in connexion with the general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash and deafening explosion which followed the Federal Hill occurrence were even more tremendous farther east, where a burst of the singular foetor was likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College Hill, where the crash awaked all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already awake only a few saw the anomalous blaze of light near the top of the hill, or noticed the inexplicable upward rush of air which almost stripped the leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the gardens. It was agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere in this neighbourhood, though no trace of its striking could afterward be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary flash burst, but his observation has not been verified. All of the few observers, however, agree as to the violent gust from the west and the flood of intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke; whilst evidence concerning the momentary burned odour after the stroke is equally general. These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable connexion with the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake's study, noticed the blurred white face at the westward window on the morning of the 9th, and wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they saw the same face in the same position that evening, they felt worried, and watched for the lights to come up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman force the door. The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when the intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark, convulsive fright on the twisted features, they turned away in sickened dismay. Shortly afterward the coroner's physician made an examination, and despite the unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous tension induced by electrical discharge, as the cause of death. The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not improbable result of the profound shock as experienced by a person of such abnormal imagination and unbalanced emotions. He deduced these latter qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in the apartment, and from the blindly scrawled entries in the diary on the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last, and the broken-pointed pencil was found clutched in his spasmodically contracted right hand. The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed, and legible only in part. From them certain investigators have drawn conclusions differing greatly from the materialistic official verdict, but such speculations have little chance for belief among the conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists has not been helped by the action of superstitious Dr. Dexter, who threw the curious box and angled stone—an object certainly self-luminous as seen in the black windowless steeple where it was found—into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and neurotic unbalance on Blake's part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil bygone cult whose startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant interpretation given those final frenzied jottings. These are the entries—or all that can be made of them. “Lights still out—must be five minutes now. Everything depends on lightning. Yaddith grant it will keep up! . . . Some influence seems beating through it. . . . Rain and thunder and wind deafen. . . . The thing is taking hold of my mind. . . . “Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds and other galaxies . . . Dark . . . The lightning seems dark and the darkness seems light. . . . “It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the pitch-darkness. Must be retinal impression left by flashes. Heaven grant the Italians are out with their candles if the lightning stops! “What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets. . . . “The long, winging flight through the void . . . cannot cross the universe of light . . . re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron . . . send it through the horrible abysses of radiance. . . . “My name is Blake—Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. . . . I am on this planet. . . . “Azathoth have mercy!—the lightning no longer flashes—horrible—I can see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight—light is dark and dark is light . . . those people on the hill . . . guard . . . candles and charms . . . their priests. . . . “Sense of distance gone—far is near and near is far. No light—no glass—see that steeple—that tower—window—can hear—Roderick Usher—am mad or going mad—the thing is stirring and fumbling in the tower—I am it and it is I—I want to get out . . . must get out and unify the forces. . . . It knows where I am. . . . “I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odour . . . senses transfigured . . . boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way. . . . Iä . . . ngai . . . ygg. . . . “I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth save me—the three-lobed burning eye. . . .”

Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media.  This week, in honor of the book Aroused by Randi Hutter Epstein, we are discussing the TV Show House. Specifically we are watching Season 1, Episode 16 "Heavy", then Season 2, Episode 13 "Skin Deep", and finally Season 3, Episode 1 "Meaning". Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross, for a deep dive into this classic medical drama.  We'll be looking into hormonal diseases, and how each medical mystery challenges House and his team. Follow us on Twitter (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@peculiarBC⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠), Facebook (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠facebook.com/groups/peculiarbooksclub⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠), Instagram (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@thepeculiarbookclub⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠), and Youtube (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/PeculiarBookClub⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)!

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Last time we spoke about the Blagoveshchensk massacre and war over the Amur river. The Chinese began a bombardment of the city of Blagoveshchensk striking panic and fear into her Russian inhabitants. The panic and fear led the Russian commanders ordered the deportation of many Chinese over the Amur river and this soon became a large-scale massacre. Countless Chinese drowned or were killed under the orders of the local Russian commanders. After the horrors on the Amur river the russians gradually received reinforcements and began a large scale offensive over the river to stop the Chinese attacks. First to be hit was Sakhalian, sending its Chinese defenders fleeing towards Aigun and Tsitsihar. The Chinese tried to fortify mountain positions to stop the Russians, but each fell one by one until the Russians had taken the cities. More Russians were crossing the border into Manchuria, the minor conflict had become a full scale invasion.    #70 The Russo-Chinese War Part 3: The Conquest of Northern Manchuria   Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. The conflict spread anywhere there was a Russian presence in Manchuria. The Manchu were gradually tossing their lot in with the Boxer cause and to be honest, the Manchu always hated the Russian encroachment in their homelands. Harbin held the headquarters for railroad construction in Manchuria. Its population swelled since the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion, with refugees pouring in from the Liaodong peninsula, including other nationalities and Chinese christians. The month of june was rather peaceful for Harbin, the Chinese continued to work on the railway alongside their Russian colleagues. 60,000 Chinese laborers had recently come to Harbin to work and telegrams poured in from Manchu generals from Heilungchiang, Fengtian and Kirin guaranteeing the complete safety of the railway and Russians. But beginning in July, rumors spread of anti-foreign activity, telegrams from other Russian settlements being attacked flooded in. On July 5th, a report came in that the Roman catholic mission in Mukden had been destroyed and its Bishop was murdered. Civilians began to evacuate Harbin to Khabrovsk on steamers and barges. Harin braced itself for a Chinese attack, volunteer militias sprang up. Thousands of Chinese inhabitants of Harbin fled as Russian refugees flooded in from all over. Large numbers of Qing forces were reportedly converging on Harbin, so Captain Rzhevutskii came over from Tiehling with 6 officers, 250 Cossacks, militiamen and all of their families. His arrival bolstered the Harbin garrison who were only around 600 men, 300 of which had just come from Tsitsihar on July 14th. A force of 67 Cossack fought their way out of Kirin against a much larger force of Chinese. Their commander Savitskii was found at Laoshaokou on July 19th with only 38 Cossacks left, many wounded. Savitskii's left eye was riddled with bullet splinters and his arm was in a sling. His men had rode out under the assurances of safe passage from the Manchu General of Kirin only to be attacked by 500 Manchu with artillery support. The Manchu fired shrapnel not just over the Cossacks, but their own infantry when they engaged in hand to hand combat. Savitskii claimed their killed some 200 Chinese before breaking through their lines and were pursued for over 5 days. A eyewitness to their arrival in Harbin had this to say “tears welled up in our eyes and anger began to boil in our hearts, when we saw the valiant heroes who had arrived. The men walked barefoot, with feet that were skinned almost to the bones, many only in their underwear, exhausted and emaciated. Truly one could not believe somehow that the Chinese had not succeeded in wiping this handful of men from the face of the earth”. Luckily for Harbin, on July 21st a steamer arrived to her dock from Khabarovsk carrying 1000 rifles, ammunition and 4 companies of reservists. Now Harbin counted 2000 defenders. On July 22nd a telegram came to Harbin from the Manchu General of Heilungchiang. It stated that while there had been cooperation with the Russian railway builders until this point, he regarded the Russian drowning of Chinese to be tantamount to a declaration of war and now both sides were free to attack the other. The message confused the Russians at Harbin for some time, having not heard of the Blagoveshchensk massacre. The rest of the message was crystal clear. The same Manchu General proclaimed the assault against Harbin would come soon and that the Russians should fight bravely for they would be exterminated without mercy. He did however offer safe passage for women and children out of Manchuria. 3000 women, children and wounded men departed Harbin aboard steamers on July 23rd. Meanwhile the Russians prepared their defenses and on the 25th the Chinese arrived. At 4am on the 26th the Chinese began firing their artillery from across the river. Their forces approached Harbin from the south and east successfully seizing the railway depot of the First Sungari Station and that railroad between the New part of the city and old Harbin. A Cossack counter attack during the afternoon drove most of the Chinese back in the direction of Ashiho. The Russians attempted to encircle the Chinese and quickly capture their artillery, but the Chinese withdrew in haste before they could. Countless Chinese who failed to rejoin the main body of their force were cut down by Cossacks. A smaller group of Chinese tried to hunker down at the railway depot and offered a stubborn fight until they were killed.  The Chinese took up a new position at the Hanhsin plant which had some large walls with towers providing good defense. From their fortifications the Chinese fired back upon the Russians, but once they burst open the main gate the Chinese were again on the move. As Sergei Grudzinskii entered the plant he had this to say of the scene “The corpses of men and cadavers of horses lay strewn about everywhere. Sabers and bayonets sparkled. People jostled each other in disorder. All had agitated faces, as if drunk. The noise of voices and swear words filled the air, which was saturated with the heavy smell of blood, sweat and gunpowder. Frightened children, ducks, oxen and horses ran around. Now and then the short, whiplashed like shots of our 20 caliber rifles were heard. The men had gotten all excited. There was no mercy for anyone. Aroused, someone had set fire to a house, and thick, black smoke rose to the sky, as the bright sun beamed indifferently on the picture of death and destruction below”. The Russians captured many Krupp field guns, German rifles and other war materials.  On July the 27th and 28th the Chinese continued to bombard Harbins dock from across the river and fired upon any trains going by. The Chinese were using any local infrastructure around for protection so the Russains began burning everything. By July 28th the Chinese were abandoning their positions on the other side of the river. Some skirmishing was done with rearguards and some Chinese POW's revealed a second offensive, 25,000 men strong was scheduled to hit Harbin for August 3rd. But when the time came no Chinese army was to be found and steamers were coming to Harbin with relief forces, the siege of the city was over. With reinforcements on hand, the Russians sent word to nearby Ashih-ho where some 10,000 Chinese forces were gathering. The Russians notified them they wanted to re-establish friendly relations and called upon the Chinese to disband. They also wrote to the Manchu General of Heilungchiang who responded simply “I will be seeing you soon”. The commander of Ashihho responded by sending a small battery to fire upon Harbin. On August 17th the Russians advanced upon Ashiho, Major General Gerngros led a Cossack vanguard; Major General Alekseev commanded the main body around a mile behind; and overall command was under Major General Sakharov. They were 16 companies, 12.5 sotnias and 16 artillery pieces. By the 18th they reached Ashihho, they sent word to the Manchu commander asking his surrender and he replied he would disband his forces when General Sakharov compensated China for the destruction of Pa-yen-tung, Sanhsing and other places damaged while withdrawing from Manchuria. It seems his words were braver than his actions, for when the Russians stormed the gates they would find the city in a state of evacuation. Cossacks with artillery support stormed around the city from the west and east to cut off the fleeing Chinese. A large number were killed, many others taken prisoner. The commander of the 4th East Siberian Rifle regiment was appointed commandant of Ashihho. The major objections of the Russians in Manchuria by this point was to defeat the Qing forces allying themselves to the Boxers, to secure the railway construction and secure the Amur River navigation. For logistical purpose the job was divided in two; north manchurian campaigns were led by Lt General Grodekov and South Manchurian were under Vice Admiral Alekseev. Russia sought to recover the main railway line of the Chinese eastern railway that ran from the Transbaikal region, to Tsitsihar, Harbin, Pogranichnaia and Nikol'sk-Ussuriiskii. Alongside this the Russians also needed to seize Kirin and Mukden to consolidate control in the region. Now this was all a colossal task, the sheer distance from the Transbaikal region to Manchuria was incredible. There was a shortage of steamers, so barges and rafts had to be constructed, bad harvests resulted in less provisions and just getting men and supplies to the front was hellish. Nonetheless the job was to be done, and between June and July 16 battalions, 38 guns, 6 sotnias, 2 sapper companies and 2 railway companies were rushed from Priamur to Kwantung and Pechihli. To compensate for depleting the Priemur region, Siberia would need to send forces.   The mobilization was incredible. In the Transbaikal region in 1900 there was roughly 25,000 Russians of working age, from these 5000 men made up 5 cavalry regiments, 4 cavalry batteries and 4 infantry battalions were tossed together to form the “Hailar detachment” called so because they would advance against Hailar. They all had military training, but lacked a lot of discipline. The men were notorious for smoking in front of their superiors and during saluting times would often just nod their head. The Cossacks amongst them would not let superior officers strike them which was a custom in the army. But the men were pretty crack shots and could live off meager rations. Furthermore most of them had dealings and were on good terms with Mongols and Manchu. The leader of the Hailar detachment was Major General Orlov who mobilized them on July 25th and they proceeded from Abagaitui to cross the border. They followed the Hailar rivers until they reached the Dalai Nor railroad station on July 27th. They captured there 51 well armed Mongols without resistance and sent them back to Russia to help construct the Transbaikal railroad. From here they advanced to Ongun whereupon they saw at a distance some Manchu and Mongol cavalry spread out in orderly lines of single rank, behind them were infantry. According to some Chinese prisoners, the force was around 10,000 strong under the command of a General in Hailar. The Mongol cavalry advanced and fired upon them from a great distance, not hitting very much. The Russians held their fire, so the Mongols drew closer and pelted them with bullets. This time the Russian returned fire, but the Mongols persisted and dismounted from their horses, beginning to dig foxholes. The Russians resumed their defensive stance, watching the Chinese pull up artillery. At 11:45am the Russian's received some reinforcements, 2000 additional bayonets, 1000 savers and 6 cannons of the Verkhneudinsk Cossack regiment. The Chinese artillery was roughly 5000 feet away, their riflemen just 800 or so. The Verkneudinsk regiment rode out upon their right flank at 1:50pm signaling the Russian general attack. Orlov took the left flank performing a small envelopment maneuver. It was a bold and bloody advance. At 2:10pm the Russian artillery began to fire and it was deadly accurate, the Chinese artillery quickly evacuated, unable to properly return fire. At 2:25pm Orlov tossed some reserves into the advance and soon the Russians were charging across an open plain driving the Chinese from a hill position. The mounted Cossacks pursued any retreating Chinese forces who were seen tossing their weapons and equipment as they ran. Orlov got caught up in the chase and excitement and was almost shot while his staff officer screamed “Sir! You're being shot at!” Some Boxer forces stood their ground defiantly against Cossack sabers, butchered on the spot. The Russians had only 8 deaths and 17 wounded and claimed an incredible 900 casualties for the Chinese. Orlov sent his mounted forces to pursue the enemy and perform reconnaissance of Hailars defenses which his scouts reported was being abandoned. Orlov ordered a Cossack battery to rush to Hailar during the night of August 1st as he led more men against Urdingi. The roads were littered with abandoned equipment, but Orlov received a new report in the morning, Hailar was not abandoned after all. There was a call for help at the Hailar front, so Orlov sent two Sotnias of the 4th and 6th battalions and he personally came by August 3rd. Upon seeing the reinforcements, the Chinese began to abandon the city and Orlov would have his dinner inside Hailar on that day. Hailar was a small district city, but it was important strategically for the Chinese eastern railway's construction. Orlov formed a supply depot at Hailar not only for his detachment, but for other Russian forces going through the area. Upon seeing the taking of Ongun and Hailar, the Mongols realized the Russians were stronger than the Manchu. The Mongols began abandoning the Chinese and fled to their homelands to wait out the conflict.  Meanwhile General Bao, one of China's more able commander, realized the loss of Hailar was significant and began to approach the region from the Greater Hsing-an Mountains with a force 7000 strong. Cossack patrols reported Bao's advance to Orlov and Orlov decided to go out and meet him. On August 14th the Russian took up a position at Ya-koshih some 23 miles east of Hailar. The two forces would clash at 2pm and the battle would rage for many hours. The brunt of the fighting was felt by the Transbaikal Cossack battalions who charged into Bao's left flank. A severe thunderstorm broke out during the battle and Orlov used it to conceal a held back reserve battalion to charge into the right flank of the Chinese. When both flanks were being hit Orlov called for a general forward assault. General Bao was a well recognized figure and some Russian sotnias came across his dead body on the battlefield before they crashed into a Chinese rear guard at 10pm. The Chinese had routed and enraged by the intensity of the battle the Cossacks ran them down hard. The victory at Yakoshih would give Russia control over the western part of Manchuria up to the Greater Hsing'an Mountains. On the mountains a newly formed detachment under General Chou Mien established a heavily fortified position.  A flying detachment led by Bulatovich was sent to Hsing-an on August 19th and the approached the Chinese positions on the mountain to prod their defenses. Bulatovich personally led a small group to drive out a Chinese forward post near a bridge so most of his forces could get across a river to venture into the foot of the mountains. A full reconnaissance was performed, while the rest of the Hailar detachment were 40 miles away enroute. On August 20th, without waiting for reinforcements that were due to Hailar at any moment, Orlov advanced. Orlov took his forces to seize the Mien-tu-ho station, Ha-la-kuo station and I-Lieh'ko'te from which at a moment's notice he could help Bulatovich's position, being just 10 miles away or so. Orlov ordered the forces to slowly push into the mountains proclaiming to the men “Well done Verkhneudinks Cossacks! With God, lets see what the mysterious Greater Hsing-an is like!” From the 3 different locations the men advanced. Orlov planned to cross over a ridge 20 miles south of the Chinese position to get behind their rear and cut off their road towards Tsitsihar. While planning his attack, Orlov received word that Beijing had just been taken by the 8 nation alliance on August 14th and that Harbin was occupied by Russians as well.  At 5am on August 23d, Bulatovich began a envelopment maneuver while the main body advanced with Orlov. The Chinese would be unable to see the main bodies movements due to the mountain ranges. Once they approached the Chinese rear, Orlov began planning out artillery positions and watched with binoculars through some bushes at the Chinese positions. His report of the actions state the Chinese trenches were dug absurdly, in a line of square holes across the main road that could only face a frontal attack. He was also surprised to find out many nearby heights held no enemy posts, they easily could be used against them. Orlov took up a position that overlooked the entire left flank of the Chinese position. His artillery positions were perfect, nothing would obstruct their bombardment. At 2am the next day Orlov sent forward companies to seize the nearby heights lest the Chinese grab them at the last minute. At 6:45am the Chinese had advanced forward on the right flank catching the Russian position in enfilade fire. Cossacks charged into them swiftly and at 7:30am the Russian artillery began its bombardment which quickly silence the Chinese artillery. Suddenly the Chinese right flank was hit with Cossack sotnia's causing confusion. Chinese riflemen tried to get out of their trenches but were pinned down by the artillery shrapnel and soon the Cossacks were firing into the trenches butchering them. The battle was a brief one, the Chinese were simply not prepared to face attacks from multiple directions. After only 50 minutes the Chinese began a withdrawal. The Russians would have completely encircled and annihilated them, but the rear units rushed over to help a pinned down Russian company. Russian reported 3 deaths and 9 wounded, taking countless Chinese lives and seizing 5 artillery pieces and 120 carts of war materials.  The Chinese fled to Tsitsihar the capital of Heilungchiang province. Manchu General Shou Shan held a very strong garrison there. A detachment led by Bolsheretsk was already advancing upon Tsitsihar and Orlov was to meet up with him. On September the 2nd, Orlov arrived to the outskirts of Tsitsihar and 2 days later he entered the city, as the Bolsheretsk detachment had already battled and taken the city by August 28th. Its large Chinese garrison had fled towards Petuna. The reason they had fled was due to the psychological impact of General Rennenkampfs daring campaign, as you will recall General Shou Shan had committed suicide having lost to him. Apparently Shou Shan swallowed gold to rupture his intestines, I've never heard of that one before.  With the Hailar detachment and Bolsheretsk detachment together at Tsitsihar, they now had a force of 12 battalion, 14 sotnias and 22 artillery pieces altogether. Orlov sent orders for Rennenkampt to take 12 sotnias and 6 cavalry guns to advance upon Petuna while he would follow behind. Petuna was around 200 miles away and the Russians would have to ford the Nonni and Sungari rivers. Rennenkampft managed to get to Petuna in 5 days and found it sheltered 1500 Chinese Infantry and 150 cavalry units. A Qing official named Li rode out to parley with Rennenkampt, asserting to him they had 5000 men and asked for a armistice of 2 days. Rennenkampf replied that his detachment would be within Petuna that very evening and that by 6am all of the Chinese must come to their camp and lay down their arms. Rennenkampf really does seem like a badass doesn't he? At 6am on september 12th, the Chinese cavalry fully armed approached the camp and made a display of surrendering their arms. Then the Chinese infantry followed suit. The Chinese forces were herded away to help construct the railroad. On the 19th the main body reached Petuna, there Orlove and the other commanders decided to hit Kirin city, the capital of Kirin province. Mounted Cossacks were sent south of the Sungari river to hit Kirin from the south while the main body would advance north of the Sungair to hit Kirin from the north. Rennenkampf elected himself to perform a reconnaissance and set out on September 22nd with two sotnias. At 3pm the village of Tashuiho which lied on the junction of Mukden and Kirin was attacked by Rennekampfs force. Rennekampf was nearly speared to death during the attack, but they managed to fight off the Chinese. At 7am on the 23rd Rennenkmapf arrived to Kirin and a bearer of a flag of truce came out. The flag bearer asked for an armistice and again Rennenkampf rejected this and literally galloped into Kirin and headed for the Governor's mansion. This guy fancies himself Julius Caesar I guess. 220 Chinese cavalry who guarded the mansion were quickly surrounded and disarmed. Within Kirin Rennenkampf captured 69 modern rifles and 5000 other rifles of various dates which he tossed into the Sungari river. Rennenkampf had thus taken a fortified city of 120,000 inhabitants with 200 Cossacks, an unbelievable feat. But in reality, Prince Qing had actually ordered the governor of Kirin to suspend all hostility against the Russians. I bet Rennenkampf forgot to mention that part in his action report. Like I said a Julius Caesar kind of guy haha.  With Kirin in their hands, Orlovs detachment turned back to Harbin, where he would soon receive orders to return home so the Transbaikal Cossacks could tend to their farms, just in time for harvesting. Rennenkampf would remain in Kirin until the arrival of Major General Kryshanovskii with 4 squadrons of dragoons, 1 Chita Cossack sotnia, the 3rd Transbaikal cossack battery and a mounted train of artillery on September 26th. Rennenkampf took his small force to Tiehling where Russian forces were preparing for a large offensive against Mukden. Orlov's campaign was an extremely fast one, his forces covered extreme distances, going 20 miles or so per day. A telegram from Lt General Matsievskii, the commander of the Transbaikal Cossack forces told Orlov his men had broken all records in the campaign. Casualties for the Hailar detachment were 468 in total. The Chinese had been routed, not by cowardice however. They fought bravely and were well armed, it seemed to Russian eye witness accounts they lacked proper marksmanship. The Qing officers seemed to be ignorant of modern military tactics and this heavily affected their organization. The Manchu General of Heilungchiang had sent troops simultaneously in three directions against the Hailar detachment, the Bolsheretsk detachment and the Khabarovsk detachment, not to mention sending other dispatches against Harbin. Orlov believed the Chinese could have won if they consolidated and hammered the Russians one force at a time. With the capture of Kirin, Qing officials now tried to ingratiate themselves with the Russians, giving them the old wine and dine treatment.  The final Russian offensive would be mounted in southern Manchuria. Major General Fleisher, was appointed commander of the newly formed South Manchurian Detachment. On August the 8th after Yingkou was taken, Mishchenko joined up with Domrovskii at Tashihciao. The Chinese had consolidated around Haicheng with a strength of around 4 battalion and 4 artillery pieces. The Russian forces at Tashihciao did not have many mounted Cossacks to perform a proper reconnaissance and as a result would not have a good idea of the Chinese strength. Thus the Russians overestimated the enemy. Fleisher ordered 3 columns to advance, in the middle was Colonel Aurenius leading the 3rd East Sierian rifle regiment with 8 guns and a section of Cossacks; on the left was Mishchenko with two companies, two Cossack squadrons and the 1st Transbaikal Cossack battery; and on the right was Dombrovskii with 4 and a half companies of the 11th east siberian rifle regiment, 4 guns and a squadron of Cossacks. The three columns departed Tashihciao on August 10th. Aurelius's central column ran into a Chinese outpost who upon seeing them began to flee north towards Haicheng, only to run into Mishchenko's forces. Dombrovskii's column were advancing through some difficult mountain terrain to try and block escape routes for the Chinese. Mishchenko's force suffered casualties from Chinese artillery, but when the Chinese tried to press an attack, the 1st Cossack Battery battered their formations. Aurelius tried to advance faster to catch up to the Chinese, but they kept slipping away. In the face of the advancing Russians, the Chinese evacuated Huchuangtun, destroying all useful war materials there. On August 11th the Russian columns reunited for and made camp, then the next day continued towards Haicheng in two columns. The main column commanded by Fleisher consisted of his detachment, Dombrovskii's detachment and sotnia of Cossacks. They advanced northward along the railway line. The other column led by Mishchenko traveled parallel with the main column to the left.  General Shou planned to lure the Russians over towards Newchwang and spring a trap, but his subordinates refused to abandon Haicheng without a fight. Yun assumed command over the Haicheng militia and had his forces harass Mishchenko's smaller column as they advanced. Yun set up an ambush for Mishchenko, deploying some artillery on a mountain range, but the Russians quickly overran them. While Mishchenko was fighting in the mountain range, a large force of Boxers from Haicheng tried to recapture the Chinese artillery. The Russians saw a hoard of yellow sash wearing Boxers, most of whom were prepared for hand to hand combat. The Boxers charged the Russians furiously, and Russians reported seeing very old men, some young boys and even a few girls amongst their force. Cossacks reported the Boxers tried to grab them down from their horses, but were no match for sabers. At 2am on August 12th the Russians were brushing off the attacks and ambushes and continuing their advance. By this point the Chinese had roughly 4000 regular troops, 8 artillery pieces and 1000 Boxers who had all retreated during the night for Haicheng. When the Russians reached Haicheng, the Chinese defenses collapsed. The Russian artillery had only just begun firing as the Chinese artillery crews abandoned their equipment and began fleeing. The only real resistance would be rear guard actions as the Russians stormed into Haicheng. Patrols were first sent into the city to see what kind of state it was in. Many inhabitants were known to the Russians as they were workers on the railway and the patrol forces assured them all they would see no harm. As the Russian main force entered the city, the Chinese came out with gifts of chicken, eggs and vegetables and both sides were quite relieved by the outcome. Konstantin had entered the city and met with some Chinese families he knew from railway work, gave them all assurances there was going to be no violence within the city. Railway guards were initially stationed in the city, but soon relieved whereupon regular Russian troops came in. Konstantin had departed Haicheng for some meetings and when he returned some days later, he went to a Chinese family acquaintance to find they had been butchered inside the home. Konstantin recalled “two old men lay in puddles of blood, bayoneted to death, while a young boy, about eight years old, with his belly ripped open, squirmed in agony”. Konstantin was livid, and went to the nearest sergeant major to ask where the other Chinese were and was told “they are farther away from their sin”. That same day a doctor in Konstantins regiment was called upon to revive an old woman and younger girl. Both had been expelled for the city, ran into solders who killed the older womans husband and raped the younger girl. In agony the two tossed themselves into a river to commit suicide. The old woman was revived, and the girl died. Konstantin bitterly watched as more innocent bystanders died. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. Northern Manchuria is firmly under Russian control and gradually southern Manchuria is falling to the same fate. The price of war as usual is always felt heaviest on the innocent civilian populations. Unfortunately Manchuria will face such horror for decades to come. 

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