"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (also known as "The White Ape" and simply "Arthur Jermyn") is a short story in the horror fiction genre, written by American author H. P. Lovecraft in 1920. The themes of the story are tainted ancestry, knowledge that it would be best to remain unaware of, and a reality which human understanding finds intolerable. Plot The story begins by describing the ancestors of Sir Arthur Jermyn, a British nobleman. His great-great-great-grandfather was Sir Wade Jermyn, an early explorer of the Congo region whose books on a mysterious white civilization there were ridiculed. He was confined to an asylum in 1765. Lovecraft describes how the Jermyn family has a peculiar physical appearance that began to appear in the children of Wade Jermyn and his mysterious and reclusive wife, who Wade claimed was Portuguese. Wade's son, Philip Jermyn, was a sailor who joined the navy after fathering his son and disappeared from his ship one night as it lay off the Congo coast. Philip's son, Robert Jermyn, was a scientist who made two expeditions into the interior of Africa. He married a daughter of the (fictional) 7th Viscount Brightholme and fathered three children, two of whom suffered from severe disabilities, but the middle one of whom, Nevil Jermyn, had a son, Alfred, who was Arthur's father. In 1852, Robert met with an explorer, Samuel Seaton, who described "a grey city of white apes ruled by a white god". Robert killed the explorer after hearing this, as well as all three of his children. Nevil managed to save his son, Alfred, before his death. Robert was put in an asylum and, after two years, died there. Alfred grew up to inherit his grandfather's title but abandoned his wife and child to join a circus, where he became fascinated with a gorilla "of lighter colour than the average". He became its trainer, but was killed in Chicago after an incident in which the gorilla attacked him and he fought back. Arthur inherited the family possessions and moved into Jermyn House with his mother. Arthur is described as having a very unusual appearance, and supposedly the strangest in the line descended from Wade. Arthur became a scholar, eventually visiting the Belgian Congo on a research expedition, where he heard tales of a stone city of white apes and the stuffed body of a white ape goddess,