At the Mountains of Madness
ONE
I am forced into speech because men of science
have refused to follow my advice without knowing
why. It is altogether against my will that
I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated
invasion of the antarctic—with its vast
fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting
of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more
reluctant because my warning may be in vain.
Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal
them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what
will seem extravagant and incredible there
would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld
photographs, both ordinary and aërial, will
count in my favour; for they are damnably
vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted
because of the great lengths to which clever
fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of
course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures;
notwithstanding a strangeness of technique
which art experts ought to remark and puzzle
over.
In the end I must rely on the judgment and
standing of the few scientific leaders who
have, on the one hand, sufficient independence
of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously
convincing merits or in the light of certain
primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles;
and on the other hand, sufficient influence
to deter the exploring world in general from
any rash and overambitious programme in the
region of those mountains of madness. It is
an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure
men like myself and my associates, connected
only with a small university, have little
chance of making an impression where matters
of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial
nature are concerned.
It is further against us that we are not,
in the strictest sense, specialists in the
fields which came primarily to be concerned.
As a geologist my object in leading the Miskatonic
University Expedition was wholly that of securing
deep-level specimens of rock and soil from
various parts of the antarctic continent,
aided by the remarkable drill devised by Prof.
Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department.
I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other
field than this; but I did hope that the use
of this new mechanical appliance at different
points along previously explored paths would
bring to light materials of a sort hitherto
unreached by the ordinary methods of collection.
Pabodie’s drilling apparatus, as the public
already knows from our reports, was unique
and radical in its lightness, portability,
and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian
drill principle with the principle of the
small circular rock drill in such a way as
to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness.
Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor,
collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia,
cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional
piping for bores five inches wide and up to
1000 feet deep all formed, with needed accessories,
no greater load than three seven-dog sledges
could carry; this being made possible by the
clever aluminum alloy of which most of the
metal objects were fashioned. Four large Dornier
aëroplanes, designed especially for the tremendous
altitude flying necessary on the antarctic
plateau and with added fuel-warming and quick-starting
devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport
our entire expedition from a base at the edge
of the great ice barrier to various suitable
inland points, and from these points a sufficient
quota of dogs would serve us.
We planned to cover as great an area as one
antarctic season—or longer, if absolutely
necessary—would permit, operating mostly
in the mountain-ranges and on the plateau
south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying
degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and
Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made
by aëroplane and involving distances great
enough to be of geological significance, we
expected to unearth a quite unprecedented
amount of material; especially in the pre-Cambrian
strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic
specimens had previously been secured. We
wished also to obtain as great as possible
a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks,
since the primal life-history of this bleak
realm of ice and death is of the highest importance
to our knowledge of the earth’s past. That
the antarctic continent was once temperate
and even tropical, with a teeming vegetable
and animal life of which the lichens, marine
fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern
edge are the only survivals, is a matter of
common information; and we hoped to expand
that information in variety, accuracy, and
detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous
signs, we would enlarge the aperture by blasting
in order to get specimens of suitable size
and condition.
Our borings, of varying depth according to
the promise held out by the upper soil or
rock, were to be confined to exposed or nearly
exposed land surfaces—these inevitably being
slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile
thickness of solid ice overlying the lower
levels. We could not afford to waste drilling
depth on any considerable amount of mere glaciation,
though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking
copper electrodes in thick clusters of borings
and melting off limited areas of ice with
current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It
is this plan—which we could not put into
effect except experimentally on an expedition
such as ours—that the coming Starkweather-Moore
Expedition proposes to follow despite the
warnings I have issued since our return from
the antarctic.
The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition
through our frequent wireless reports to the
Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and
through the later articles of Pabodie and
myself. We consisted of four men from the
University—Pabodie, Lake of the biology
department, Atwood of the physics department
(also a meteorologist), and I representing
geology and having nominal command—besides
sixteen assistants; seven graduate students
from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics.
Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aëroplane
pilots, all but two of whom were competent
wireless operators. Eight of them understood
navigation with compass and sextant, as did
Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course,
our two ships—wooden ex-whalers, reinforced
for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam—were
fully manned. The Nathaniel Derby Pickman
Foundation, aided by a few special contributions,
financed the expedition; hence our preparations
were extremely thorough despite the absence
of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines,
camp materials, and unassembled parts of our
five planes were delivered in Boston, and
there our ships were loaded. We were marvellously
well-equipped for our specific purposes, and
in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen,
transportation, and camp construction we profited
by the excellent example of our many recent
and exceptionally brilliant predecessors.
It was the unusual number and fame of these
predecessors which made our own expedition—ample
though it was—so little noticed by the world
at large.
As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston
Harbour on September 2, 1930; taking a leisurely
course down the coast and through the Panama
Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania,
at which latter place we took on final supplies.
None of our exploring party had ever been
in the polar regions before, hence we all
relied greatly on our ship captains—J. B.
Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving
as commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen,
commanding the barque Miskatonic—both veteran
whalers in antarctic waters. As we left the
inhabited world behind the sun sank lower
and lower in the north, and stayed longer
and longer above the horizon each day. At
about 62° South Latitude we sighted our first
icebergs—table-like objects with vertical
sides—and just before reaching the Antarctic
Circle, which we crossed on October 20 with
appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably
troubled with field ice. The falling temperature
bothered me considerably after our long voyage
through the tropics, but I tried to brace
up for the worse rigours to come. On many
occasions the curious atmospheric effects
enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly
vivid mirage—the first I had ever seen—in
which distant bergs became the battlements
of unimaginable cosmic castles.
Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately
neither extensive nor thickly packed, we regained
open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude
175°. On the morning of October 26 a strong
“land blink” appeared on the south, and
before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement
at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad
mountain chain which opened out and covered
the whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered
an outpost of the great unknown continent
and its cryptic world of frozen death. These
peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range discovered
by Ross, and it would now be our task to round
Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of
Victoria Land to our contemplated base on
the shore of McMurdo Sound at the foot of
the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77°
9′.
The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring,
great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly
against the west as the low northern sun of
noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern
sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays
over the white snow, bluish ice and water
lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope.
Through the desolate summits swept raging
intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic
wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague
suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical
piping, with notes extending over a wide range,
and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason
seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible.
Something about the scene reminded me of the
strange and disturbing Asian paintings of
Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger
and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly
fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the
dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that
I had ever looked into that monstrous book
at the college library.
On the seventh of November, sight of the westward
range having been temporarily lost, we passed
Franklin Island; and the next day descried
the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross
Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry
Mountains beyond. There now stretched off
to the east the low, white line of the great
ice barrier; rising perpendicularly to a height
of 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec,
and marking the end of southward navigation.
In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound
and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking
Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up some
12,700 feet against the eastern sky, like
a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama; while
beyond it rose the white, ghost-like height
of Mt. Terror, 10,900 feet in altitude, and
now extinct as a volcano. Puffs of smoke from
Erebus came intermittently, and one of the
graduate assistants—a brilliant young fellow
named Danforth—pointed out what looked like
lava on the snowy slope; remarking that this
mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly
been the source of Poe’s image when he wrote
seven years later of
“—the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.”
Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material,
and had talked a good deal of Poe. I was interested
myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe’s
only long story—the disturbing and enigmatical
Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore, and
on the lofty ice barrier in the background,
myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and
flapped their fins; while many fat seals were
visible on the water, swimming or sprawling
across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
Using small boats, we effected a difficult
landing on Ross Island shortly after midnight
on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line
of cable from each of the ships and preparing
to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy
arrangement. Our sensations on first treading
antarctic soil were poignant and complex,
even though at this particular point the Scott
and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us.
Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano’s
slope was only a provisional one; headquarters
being kept aboard the Arkham. We landed all
our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents,
provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting
outfit, cameras both ordinary and aërial,
aëroplane parts, and other accessories, including
three small portable wireless outfits (besides
those in the planes) capable of communicating
with the Arkham’s large outfit from any
part of the antarctic continent that we would
be likely to visit. The ship’s outfit, communicating
with the outside world, was to convey press
reports to the Arkham Advertiser’s powerful
wireless station on Kingsport Head, Mass.
We hoped to complete our work during a single
antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible
we would winter on the Arkham, sending the
Miskatonic north before the freezing of the
ice for another summer’s supplies.
I need not repeat what the newspapers have
already published about our early work: of
our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral
borings at several points on Ross Island and
the singular speed with which Pabodie’s
apparatus accomplished them, even through
solid rock layers; our provisional test of
the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous
ascent of the great barrier with sledges and
supplies; and our final assembling of five
huge aëroplanes at the camp atop the barrier.
The health of our land party—twenty men
and 55 Alaskan sledge dogs—was remarkable,
though of course we had so far encountered
no really destructive temperatures or windstorms.
For the most part, the thermometer varied
between zero and 20° or 25° above, and our
experience with New England winters had accustomed
us to rigours of this sort. The barrier camp
was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage
cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite,
and other supplies. Only four of our planes
were needed to carry the actual exploring
material, the fifth being left with a pilot
and two men from the ships at the storage
cache to form a means of reaching us from
the Arkham in case all our exploring planes
were lost. Later, when not using all the other
planes for moving apparatus, we would employ
one or two in a shuttle transportation service
between this cache and another permanent base
on the great plateau from 600 to 700 miles
southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. Despite
the almost unanimous accounts of appalling
winds and tempests that pour down from the
plateau, we determined to dispense with intermediate
bases; taking our chances in the interest
of economy and probable efficiency.
Wireless reports have spoken of the breath-taking
four-hour non-stop flight of our squadron
on November 21 over the lofty shelf ice, with
vast peaks rising on the west, and the unfathomed
silences echoing to the sound of our engines.
Wind troubled us only moderately, and our
radio compasses helped us through the one
opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise
loomed ahead, between Latitudes 83° and 84°,
we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier,
the largest valley glacier in the world, and
that the frozen sea was now giving place to
a frowning and mountainous coastline. At last
we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead
world of the ultimate south, and even as we
realised it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen
in the eastern distance, towering up to its
height of almost 15,000 feet.
The successful establishment of the southern
base above the glacier in Latitude 86° 7′,
East Longitude 174° 23′, and the phenomenally
rapid and effective borings and blastings
made at various points reached by our sledge
trips and short aëroplane flights, are matters
of history; as is the arduous and triumphant
ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of
the graduate students—Gedney and Carroll—on
December 13–15. We were some 8500 feet above
sea-level, and when experimental drillings
revealed solid ground only twelve feet down
through the snow and ice at certain points,
we made considerable use of the small melting
apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting
at many places where no previous explorer
had ever thought of securing mineral specimens.
The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones
thus obtained confirmed our belief that this
plateau was homogeneous with the great bulk
of the continent to the west, but somewhat
different from the parts lying eastward below
South America—which we then thought to form
a separate and smaller continent divided from
the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross
and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved
the hypothesis.
In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and
chiselled after boring revealed their nature,
we found some highly interesting fossil markings
and fragments—notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites,
crinoids, and such molluscs as lingulae and
gasteropods—all of which seemed of real
significance in connexion with the region’s
primordial history. There was also a queer
triangular, striated marking about a foot
in greatest diameter which Lake pieced together
from three fragments of slate brought up from
a deep-blasted aperture. These fragments came
from a point to the westward, near the Queen
Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist,
seemed to find their curious marking unusually
puzzling and provocative, though to my geological
eye it looked not unlike some of the ripple
effects reasonably common in the sedimentary
rocks. Since slate is no more than a metamorphic
formation into which a sedimentary stratum
is pressed, and since the pressure itself
produces odd distorting effects on any markings
which may exist, I saw no reason for extreme
wonder over the striated depression.
On January 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth,
all six of the students, four mechanics, and
I flew directly over the south pole in two
of the great planes, being forced down once
by a sudden high wind which fortunately did
not develop into a typical storm. This was,
as the papers have stated, one of several
observation flights; during others of which
we tried to discern new topographical features
in areas unreached by previous explorers.
Our early flights were disappointing in this
latter respect; though they afforded us some
magnificent examples of the richly fantastic
and deceptive mirages of the polar regions,
of which our sea voyage had given us some
brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated
in the sky as enchanted cities, and often
the whole white world would dissolve into
a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian
dreams and adventurous expectancy under the
magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days
we had considerable trouble in flying, owing
to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to
merge into one mystical opalescent void with
no visible horizon to mark the junction of
the two.
At length we resolved to carry out our original
plan of flying 500 miles eastward with all
four exploring planes and establishing a fresh
sub-base at a point which would probably be
on the smaller continental division, as we
mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens
obtained there would be desirable for purposes
of comparison. Our health so far had remained
excellent; lime-juice well offsetting the
steady diet of tinned and salted food, and
temperatures generally above zero enabling
us to do without our thickest furs. It was
now midsummer, and with haste and care we
might be able to conclude work by March and
avoid a tedious wintering through the long
antarctic night. Several savage windstorms
had burst upon us from the west, but we had
escaped damage through the skill of Atwood
in devising rudimentary aëroplane shelters
and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing
the principal camp buildings with snow. Our
good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost
uncanny.
The outside world knew, of course, of our
programme, and was told also of Lake’s strange
and dogged insistence on a westward—or rather,
northwestward—prospecting trip before our
radical shift to the new base. It seems he
had pondered a great deal, and with alarmingly
radical daring, over that triangular striated
marking in the slate; reading into it certain
contradictions in Nature and geological period
which whetted his curiosity to the utmost,
and made him avid to sink more borings and
blastings in the west-stretching formation
to which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged.
He was strangely convinced that the marking
was the print of some bulky, unknown, and
radically unclassifiable organism of considerably
advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the
rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient
a date—Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian—as
to preclude the probable existence not only
of all highly evolved life, but of any life
at all above the unicellular or at most the
trilobite stage. These fragments, with their
odd marking, must have been 500 million to
a thousand million years old.
TWO
Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively
to our wireless bulletins of Lake’s start
northwestward into regions never trodden by
human foot or penetrated by human imagination;
though we did not mention his wild hopes of
revolutionising the entire sciences of biology
and geology. His preliminary sledging and
boring journey of January 11–18 with Pabodie
and five others—marred by the loss of two
dogs in an upset when crossing one of the
great pressure-ridges in the ice—had brought
up more and more of the Archaean slate; and
even I was interested by the singular profusion
of evident fossil markings in that unbelievably
ancient stratum. These markings, however,
were of very primitive life-forms involving
no great paradox except that any life-forms
should occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian
as this seemed to be; hence I still failed
to see the good sense of Lake’s demand for
an interlude in our time-saving programme—an
interlude requiring the use of all four planes,
many men, and the whole of the expedition’s
mechanical apparatus. I did not, in the end,
veto the plan; though I decided not to accompany
the northwestward party despite Lake’s plea
for my geological advice. While they were
gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie
and five men and work out final plans for
the eastward shift. In preparation for this
transfer one of the planes had begun to move
up a good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound;
but this could wait temporarily. I kept with
me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise
to be at any time without possible transportation
in an utterly tenantless world of aeon-long
death.
Lake’s sub-expedition into the unknown,
as everyone will recall, sent out its own
reports from the short-wave transmitters on
the planes; these being simultaneously picked
up by our apparatus at the southern base and
by the Arkham at McMurdo Sound, whence they
were relayed to the outside world on wave-lengths
up to fifty metres. The start was made January
22 at 4 A.M.; and the first wireless message
we received came only two hours later, when
Lake spoke of descending and starting a small-scale
ice-melting and bore at a point some 300 miles
away from us. Six hours after that a second
and very excited message told of the frantic,
beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft had
been sunk and blasted; culminating in the
discovery of slate fragments with several
markings approximately like the one which
had caused the original puzzlement.
Three hours later a brief bulletin announced
the resumption of the flight in the teeth
of a raw and piercing gale; and when I despatched
a message of protest against further hazards,
Lake replied curtly that his new specimens
made any hazard worth taking. I saw that his
excitement had reached the point of mutiny,
and that I could do nothing to check this
headlong risk of the whole expedition’s
success; but it was appalling to think of
his plunging deeper and deeper into that treacherous
and sinister white immensity of tempests and
unfathomed mysteries which stretched off for
some 1500 miles to the half-known, half-suspected
coast-line of Queen Mary and Knox Lands.
Then, in about an hour and a half more, came
that doubly excited message from Lake’s
moving plane which almost reversed my sentiments
and made me wish I had accompanied the party.
“10:05 P.M. On the wing. After snowstorm,
have spied mountain-range ahead higher than
any hitherto seen. May equal Himalayas allowing
for height of plateau. Probable Latitude 76°
15′, Longitude 113° 10′ E. Reaches far
as can see to right and left. Suspicion of
two smoking cones. All peaks black and bare
of snow. Gale blowing off them impedes navigation.”
After that Pabodie, the men, and I hung breathlessly
over the receiver. Thought of this titanic
mountain rampart 700 miles away inflamed our
deepest sense of adventure; and we rejoiced
that our expedition, if not ourselves personally,
had been its discoverers. In half an hour
Lake called us again.
“Moulton’s plane forced down on plateau
in foothills, but nobody hurt and perhaps
can repair. Shall transfer essentials to other
three for return or further moves if necessary,
but no more heavy plane travel needed just
now. Mountains surpass anything in imagination.
Am going up scouting in Carroll’s plane,
with all weight out. You can’t imagine anything
like this. Highest peaks must go over 35,000
feet. Everest out of the running. Atwood to
work out height with theodolite while Carroll
and I go up. Probably wrong about cones, for
formations look stratified. Possibly pre-Cambrian
slate with other strata mixed in. Queer skyline
effects—regular sections of cubes clinging
to highest peaks. Whole thing marvellous in
red-gold light of low sun. Like land of mystery
in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of
untrodden wonder. Wish you were here to study.”
Though it was technically sleeping-time, not
one of us listeners thought for a moment of
retiring. It must have been a good deal the
same at McMurdo Sound, where the supply cache
and the Arkham were also getting the messages;
for Capt. Douglas gave out a call congratulating
everybody on the important find, and Sherman,
the cache operator, seconded his sentiments.
We were sorry, of course, about the damaged
aëroplane; but hoped it could be easily mended.
Then, at 11 P.M., came another call from Lake.
“Up with Carroll over highest foothills.
Don’t dare try really tall peaks in present
weather, but shall later. Frightful work climbing,
and hard going at this altitude, but worth
it. Great range fairly solid, hence can’t
get any glimpses beyond. Main summits exceed
Himalayas, and very queer. Range looks like
pre-Cambrian slate, with plain signs of many
other upheaved strata. Was wrong about volcanism.
Goes farther in either direction than we can
see. Swept clear of snow above about 21,000
feet. Odd formations on slopes of highest
mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly
vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low
vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles
clinging to steep mountains in Roerich’s
paintings. Impressive from distance. Flew
close to some, and Carroll thought they were
formed of smaller separate pieces, but that
is probably weathering. Most edges crumbled
and rounded off as if exposed to storms and
climate changes for millions of years. Parts,
especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-coloured
rock than any visible strata on slopes proper,
hence an evidently crystalline origin. Close
flying shews many cave-mouths, some unusually
regular in outline, square or semicircular.
You must come and investigate. Think I saw
rampart squarely on top of one peak. Height
seems about 30,000 to 35,000 feet. Am up 21,500
myself, in devilish gnawing cold. Wind whistles
and pipes through passes and in and out of
caves, but no flying danger so far.”
From then on for another half-hour Lake kept
up a running fire of comment, and expressed
his intention of climbing some of the peaks
on foot. I replied that I would join him as
soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie
and I would work out the best gasoline plan—just
where and how to concentrate our supply in
view of the expedition’s altered character.
Obviously, Lake’s boring operations, as
well as his aëroplane activities, would need
a great deal delivered for the new base which
he was to establish at the foot of the mountains;
and it was possible that the eastward flight
might not be made after all this season. In
connexion with this business I called Capt.
Douglas and asked him to get as much as possible
out of the ships and up the barrier with the
single dog-team we had left there. A direct
route across the unknown region between Lake
and McMurdo Sound was what we really ought
to establish.
Lake called me later to say that he had decided
to let the camp stay where Moulton’s plane
had been forced down, and where repairs had
already progressed somewhat. The ice-sheet
was very thin, with dark ground here and there
visible, and he would sink some borings and
blasts at that very point before making any
sledge trips or climbing expeditions. He spoke
of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene,
and the queer state of his sensations at being
in the lee of vast silent pinnacles whose
ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky
at the world’s rim. Atwood’s theodolite
observations had placed the height of the
five tallest peaks at from 30,000 to 34,000
feet. The windswept nature of the terrain
clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the
occasional existence of prodigious gales violent
beyond anything we had so far encountered.
His camp lay a little more than five miles
from where the higher foothills abruptly rose.
I could almost trace a note of subconscious
alarm in his words—flashed across a glacial
void of 700 miles—as he urged that we all
hasten with the matter and get the strange
new region disposed of as soon as possible.
He was about to rest now, after a continuous
day’s work of almost unparalleled speed,
strenuousness, and results.
In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless
talk with Lake and Capt. Douglas at their
widely separated bases; and it was agreed
that one of Lake’s planes would come to
my base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself,
as well as for all the fuel it could carry.
The rest of the fuel question, depending on
our decision about an easterly trip, could
wait for a few days; since Lake had enough
for immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually
the old southern base ought to be restocked;
but if we postponed the easterly trip we would
not use it till the next summer, and meanwhile
Lake must send a plane to explore a direct
route between his new mountains and McMurdo
Sound.
Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for
a short or long period, as the case might
be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would
probably fly straight from Lake’s base to
the Arkham without returning to this spot.
Some of our conical tents had already been
reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now
we decided to complete the job of making a
permanent Esquimau village. Owing to a very
liberal tent supply, Lake had with him all
that his base would need even after our arrival.
I wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be ready
for the northwestward move after one day’s
work and one night’s rest.
Our labours, however, were not very steady
after 4 P.M.; for about that time Lake began
sending in the most extraordinary and excited
messages. His working day had started unpropitiously;
since an aëroplane survey of the nearly exposed
rock surfaces shewed an entire absence of
those Archaean and primordial strata for which
he was looking, and which formed so great
a part of the colossal peaks that loomed up
at a tantalising distance from the camp. Most
of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic
and Comanchian sandstones and Permian and
Triassic schists, with now and then a glossy
black outcropping suggesting a hard and slaty
coal. This rather discouraged Lake, whose
plans all hinged on unearthing specimens more
than 500 million years older. It was clear
to him that in order to recover the Archaean
slate vein in which he had found the odd markings,
he would have to make a long sledge trip from
these foothills to the steep slopes of the
gigantic mountains themselves.
He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some
local boring as part of the expedition’s
general programme; hence set up the drill
and put five men to work with it while the
rest finished settling the camp and repairing
the damaged aëroplane. The softest visible
rock—a sandstone about a quarter of a mile
from the camp—had been chosen for the first
sampling; and the drill made excellent progress
without much supplementary blasting. It was
about three hours afterward, following the
first really heavy blast of the operation,
that the shouting of the drill crew was heard;
and that young Gedney—the acting foreman—rushed
into the camp with the startling news.
They had struck a cave. Early in the boring
the sandstone had given place to a vein of
Comanchian limestone full of minute fossil
cephalopods, corals, echini, and spirifera,
and with occasional suggestions of siliceous
sponges and marine vertebrate bones—the
latter probably of teliosts, sharks, and ganoids.
This in itself was important enough, as affording
the first vertebrate fossils the expedition
had yet secured; but when shortly afterward
the drill-head dropped through the stratum
into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and doubly
intense wave of excitement spread among the
excavators. A good-sized blast had laid open
the subterrene secret; and now, through a
jagged aperture perhaps five feet across and
three feet thick, there yawned before the
avid searchers a section of shallow limestone
hollowing worn more than fifty million years
ago by the trickling ground waters of a bygone
tropic world.
The hollowed layer was not more than seven
or eight feet deep, but extended off indefinitely
in all directions and had a fresh, slightly
moving air which suggested its membership
in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof
and floor were abundantly equipped with large
stalactites and stalagmites, some of which
met in columnar form; but important above
all else was the vast deposit of shells and
bones which in places nearly choked the passage.
Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic
tree-ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary
cycads, fan-palms, and primitive angiosperms,
this osseous medley contained representatives
of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal
species than the greatest palaeontologist
could have counted or classified in a year.
Molluscs, crustacean armour, fishes, amphibians,
reptiles, birds, and early mammals—great
and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney
ran back to the camp shouting, and no wonder
everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong
through the biting cold to where the tall
derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets
of inner earth and vanished aeons.
When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge
of his curiosity he scribbled a message in
his notebook and had young Moulton run back
to the camp to despatch it by wireless. This
was my first word of the discovery, and it
told of the identification of early shells,
bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants
of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mososaur
skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armour-plates,
pterodactyl teeth and wing-bones, archaeopteryx
debris, Miocene sharks’ teeth, primitive
bird-skulls, and skulls, vertebrae, and other
bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres,
xiphodons, dinocerases, eohippi, oreodons,
and titanotheres. There was nothing as recent
as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer,
or bovine animal; hence Lake concluded that
the last deposits had occurred during the
Oligocene age, and that the hollowed stratum
had lain in its present dried, dead, and inaccessible
state for at least thirty million years.
On the other hand, the prevalence of very
early life-forms was singular in the highest
degree. Though the limestone formation was,
on the evidence of such typical imbedded fossils
as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably
Comanchian and not a particle earlier; the
free fragments in the hollow space included
a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto
considered as peculiar to far older periods—even
rudimentary fishes, molluscs, and corals as
remote as the Silurian or Ordovician. The
inevitable inference was that in this part
of the world there had been a remarkable and
unique degree of continuity between the life
of over 300 million years ago and that of
only thirty million years ago. How far this
continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene
age when the cavern was closed, was of course
past all speculation. In any event, the coming
of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some
500,000 years ago—a mere yesterday as compared
with the age of this cavity—must have put
an end to any of the primal forms which had
locally managed to outlive their common terms.
Lake was not content to let his first message
stand, but had another bulletin written and
despatched across the snow to the camp before
Moulton could get back. After that Moulton
stayed at the wireless in one of the planes;
transmitting to me—and to the Arkham for
relaying to the outside world—the frequent
postscripts which Lake sent him by a succession
of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers
will remember the excitement created among
men of science by that afternoon’s reports—reports
which have finally led, after all these years,
to the organisation of that very Starkweather-Moore
Expedition which I am so anxious to dissuade
from its purposes. I had better give the messages
literally as Lake sent them, and as our base
operator McTighe translated them from his
pencil shorthand.
“Fowler makes discovery of highest importance
in sandstone and limestone fragments from
blasts. Several distinct triangular striated
prints like those in Archaean slate, proving
that source survived from over 600 million
years ago to Comanchian times without more
than moderate morphological changes and decrease
in average size. Comanchian prints apparently
more primitive or decadent, if anything, than
older ones. Emphasise importance of discovery
in press. Will mean to biology what Einstein
has meant to mathematics and physics. Joins
up with my previous work and amplifies conclusions.
Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that
earth has seen whole cycle or cycles of organic
life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic
cells. Was evolved and specialised not later
than thousand million years ago, when planet
was young and recently uninhabitable for any
life-forms or normal protoplasmic structure.
Question arises when, where, and how development
took place.”
“Later. Examining certain skeletal fragments
of large land and marine saurians and primitive
mammals, find singular local wounds or injuries
to bony structure not attributable to any
known predatory or carnivorous animal of any
period. Of two sorts—straight, penetrant
bores, and apparently hacking incisions. One
or two cases of cleanly severed bone. Not
many specimens affected. Am sending to camp
for electric torches. Will extend search area
underground by hacking away stalactites.”
————————
“Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone
fragment about six inches across and an inch
and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible
local formation. Greenish, but no evidences
to place its period. Has curious smoothness
and regularity. Shaped like five-pointed star
with tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage
at inward angles and in centre of surface.
Small, smooth depression in centre of unbroken
surface. Arouses much curiosity as to source
and weathering. Probably some freak of water
action. Carroll, with magnifier, thinks he
can make out additional markings of geologic
significance. Groups of tiny dots in regular
patterns. Dogs growing uneasy as we work,
and seem to hate this soapstone. Must see
if it has any peculiar odour. Will report
again when Mills gets back with light and
we start on underground area.”
“10:15 P.M. Important discovery. Orrendorf
and Watkins, working underground at 9:45 with
light, found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil
of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable
unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine
radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by mineral
salts. Tough as leather, but astonishing flexibility
retained in places. Marks of broken-off parts
at ends and around sides. Six feet end to
end, 3.5 feet central diameter, tapering to
1 foot at each end. Like a barrel with five
bulging ridges in place of staves. Lateral
breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at equator
in middle of these ridges. In furrows between
ridges are curious growths. Combs or wings
that fold up and spread out like fans. All
greatly damaged but one, which gives almost
seven-foot wing spread. Arrangement reminds
one of certain monsters of primal myth, especially
fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon. These
wings seem to be membraneous, stretched on
framework of glandular tubing. Apparent minute
orifices in frame tubing at wing tips. Ends
of body shrivelled, giving no clue to interior
or to what has been broken off there. Must
dissect when we get back to camp. Can’t
decide whether vegetable or animal. Many features
obviously of almost incredible primitiveness.
Have set all hands cutting stalactites and
looking for further specimens. Additional
scarred bones found, but these must wait.
Having trouble with dogs. They can’t endure
the new specimen, and would probably tear
it to pieces if we didn’t keep it at a distance
from them.”
“11:30 P.M. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas.
Matter of highest—I might say transcendent—importance.
Arkham must relay to Kingsport Head Station
at once. Strange barrel growth is the Archaean
thing that left prints in rocks. Mills, Boudreau,
and Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more
at underground point forty feet from aperture.
Mixed with curiously rounded and configured
soapstone fragments smaller than one previously
found—star-shaped but no marks of breakage
except at some of the points. Of organic specimens,
eight apparently perfect, with all appendages.
Have brought all to surface, leading off dogs
to distance. They cannot stand the things.
Give close attention to description and repeat
back for accuracy. Papers must get this right.
“Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot
five-ridged barrel torso 3.5 feet central
diameter, 1 foot end diameters. Dark grey,
flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot
membraneous wings of same colour, found folded,
spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing
framework tubular or glandular, of lighter
grey, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings
have serrated edge. Around equator, one at
central apex of each of the five vertical,
stave-like ridges, are five systems of light
grey flexible arms or tentacles found tightly
folded to torso but expansible to maximum
length of over 3 feet. Like arms of primitive
crinoid. Single stalks 3 inches diameter branch
after 6 inches into five sub-stalks, each
of which branches after 8 inches into five
small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving
each stalk a total of 25 tentacles.
“At top of torso blunt bulbous neck of lighter
grey with gill-like suggestions holds yellowish
five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head
covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various
prismatic colours. Head thick and puffy, about
2 feet point to point, with three-inch flexible
yellowish tubes projecting from each point.
Slit in exact centre of top probably breathing
aperture. At end of each tube is spherical
expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back
on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe,
evidently an eye. Five slightly longer reddish
tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped
head and end in sac-like swellings of same
colour which upon pressure open to bell-shaped
orifices 2 inches maximum diameter and lined
with sharp white tooth-like projections. Probable
mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points
of starfish-head found folded tightly down;
tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck
and torso. Flexibility surprising despite
vast toughness.
“At bottom of torso rough but dissimilarly
functioning counterparts of head arrangements
exist. Bulbous light-grey pseudo-neck, without
gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed
starfish-arrangement. Tough, muscular arms
4 feet long and tapering from 7 inches diameter
at base to about 2.5 at point. To each point
is attached small end of a greenish five-veined
membraneous triangle 8 inches long and 6 wide
at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or
pseudo-foot which has made prints in rocks
from a thousand million to fifty or sixty
million years old. From inner angles of starfish-arrangement
project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from
3 inches diameter at base to 1 at tip. Orifices
at tips. All these parts infinitely tough
and leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot
arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion
of some sort, marine or otherwise. When moved,
display suggestions of exaggerated muscularity.
As found, all these projections tightly folded
over pseudo-neck and end of torso, corresponding
to projections at other end.
“Cannot yet assign positively to animal
or vegetable kingdom, but odds now favour
animal. Probably represents incredibly advanced
evolution of radiata without loss of certain
primitive features. Echinoderm resemblances
unmistakable despite local contradictory evidences.
Wing structure puzzles in view of probable
marine habitat, but may have use in water
navigation. Symmetry is curiously vegetable-like,
suggesting vegetable’s essentially up-and-down
structure rather than animal’s fore-and-aft
structure. Fabulously early date of evolution,
preceding even simplest Archaean protozoa
hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as
to origin.
“Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance
to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion
of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes
inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon
and seen Clark Ashton Smith’s nightmare
paintings based on text, and will understand
when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have
created all earth-life as jest or mistake.
Students have always thought conception formed
from morbid imaginative treatment of very
ancient tropical radiata. Also like prehistoric
folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of—Cthulhu
cult appendages, etc.
“Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably
of late Cretaceous or early Eocene period,
judging from associated specimens. Massive
stalagmites deposited above them. Hard work
hewing out, but toughness prevented damage.
State of preservation miraculous, evidently
owing to limestone action. No more found so
far, but will resume search later. Job now
to get fourteen huge specimens to camp without
dogs, which bark furiously and can’t be
trusted near them. With nine men—three left
to guard the dogs—we ought to manage the
three sledges fairly well, though wind is
bad. Must establish plane communication with
McMurdo Sound and begin shipping material.
But I’ve got to dissect one of these things
before we take any rest. Wish I had a real
laboratory here. Dyer better kick himself
for having tried to stop my westward trip.
First the world’s greatest mountains, and
then this. If this last isn’t the high spot
of the expedition, I don’t know what is.
We’re made scientifically. Congrats, Pabodie,
on the drill that opened up the cave. Now
will Arkham please repeat description?”
The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt
of this report were almost beyond description,
nor were our companions much behind us in
enthusiasm. McTighe, who had hastily translated
a few high spots as they came from the droning
receiving set, wrote out the entire message
from his shorthand version as soon as Lake’s
operator signed off. All appreciated the epoch-making
significance of the discovery, and I sent
Lake congratulations as soon as the Arkham’s
operator had repeated back the descriptive
parts as requested; and my example was followed
by Sherman from his station at the McMurdo
Sound supply cache, as well as by Capt. Douglas
of the Arkham. Later, as head of the expedition,
I added some remarks to be relayed through
the Arkham to the outside world. Of course,
rest was an absurd thought amidst this excitement;
and my only wish was to get to Lake’s camp
as quickly as I could. It disappointed me
when he sent word that a rising mountain gale
made early aërial travel impossible.
But within an hour and a half interest again
rose to banish disappointment. Lake was sending
more messages, and told of the completely
successful transportation of the fourteen
great specimens to the camp. It had been a
hard pull, for the things were surprisingly
heavy; but nine men had accomplished it very
neatly. Now some of the party were hurriedly
building a snow corral at a safe distance
from the camp, to which the dogs could be
brought for greater convenience in feeding.
The specimens were laid out on the hard snow
near the camp, save for one on which Lake
was making crude attempts at dissection.
This dissection seemed to be a greater task
than had been expected; for despite the heat
of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory
tent, the deceptively flexible tissues of
the chosen specimen—a powerful and intact
one—lost nothing of their more than leathery
toughness. Lake was puzzled as to how he might
make the requisite incisions without violence
destructive enough to upset all the structural
niceties he was looking for. He had, it is
true, seven more perfect specimens; but these
were too few to use up recklessly unless the
cave might later yield an unlimited supply.
Accordingly he removed the specimen and dragged
in one which, though having remnants of the
starfish-arrangements at both ends, was badly
crushed and partly disrupted along one of
the great torso furrows.
Results, quickly reported over the wireless,
were baffling and provocative indeed. Nothing
like delicacy or accuracy was possible with
instruments hardly able to cut the anomalous
tissue, but the little that was achieved left
us all awed and bewildered. Existing biology
would have to be wholly revised, for this
thing was no product of any cell-growth science
knows about. There had been scarcely any mineral
replacement, and despite an age of perhaps
forty million years the internal organs were
wholly intact. The leathery, undeteriorative,
and almost indestructible quality was an inherent
attribute of the thing’s form of organisation;
and pertained to some palaeogean cycle of
invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our
powers of speculation. At first all that Lake
found was dry, but as the heated tent produced
its thawing effect, organic moisture of pungent
and offensive odour was encountered toward
the thing’s uninjured side. It was not blood,
but a thick, dark-green fluid apparently answering
the same purpose. By the time Lake reached
this stage all 37 dogs had been brought to
the still uncompleted corral near the camp;
and even at that distance set up a savage
barking and show of restlessness at the acrid,
diffusive smell.
Far from helping to place the strange entity,
this provisional dissection merely deepened
its mystery. All guesses about its external
members had been correct, and on the evidence
of these one could hardly hesitate to call
the thing animal; but internal inspection
brought up so many vegetable evidences that
Lake was left hopelessly at sea. It had digestion
and circulation, and eliminated waste matter
through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped
base. Cursorily, one would say that its respiratory
apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon
dioxide; and there were odd evidences of air-storage
chambers and methods of shifting respiration
from the external orifice to at least two
other fully developed breathing-systems—gills
and pores. Clearly, it was amphibian and probably
adapted to long airless hibernation-periods
as well. Vocal organs seemed present in connexion
with the main respiratory system, but they
presented anomalies beyond immediate solution.
Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable-utterance,
seemed barely conceivable; but musical piping
notes covering a wide range were highly probable.
The muscular system was almost preternaturally
developed.
The nervous system was so complex and highly
developed as to leave Lake aghast. Though
excessively primitive and archaic in some
respects, the thing had a set of ganglial
centres and connectives arguing the very extremes
of specialised development. Its five-lobed
brain was surprisingly advanced; and there
were signs of a sensory equipment, served
in part through the wiry cilia of the head,
involving factors alien to any other terrestrial
organism. Probably it had more than five senses,
so that its habits could not be predicted
from any existing analogy. It must, Lake thought,
have been a creature of keen sensitiveness
and delicately differentiated functions in
its primal world; much like the ants and bees
of today. It reproduced like the vegetable
cryptogams, especially the pteridophytes;
having spore-cases at the tips of the wings
and evidently developing from a thallus or
prothallus.
But to give it a name at this stage was mere
folly. It looked like a radiate, but was clearly
something more. It was partly vegetable, but
had three-fourths of the essentials of animal
structure. That it was marine in origin, its
symmetrical contour and certain other attributes
clearly indicated; yet one could not be exact
as to the limit of its later adaptations.
The wings, after all, held a persistent suggestion
of the aërial. How it could have undergone
its tremendously complex evolution on a new-born
earth in time to leave prints in Archaean
rocks was so far beyond conception as to make
Lake whimsically recall the primal myths about
Great Old Ones who filtered down from the
stars and concocted earth-life as a joke or
mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic hill
things from Outside told by a folklorist colleague
in Miskatonic’s English department.
Naturally, he considered the possibility of
the pre-Cambrian prints’ having been made
by a less evolved ancestor of the present
specimens; but quickly rejected this too facile
theory upon considering the advanced structural
qualities of the older fossils. If anything,
the later contours shewed decadence rather
than higher evolution. The size of the pseudo-feet
had decreased, and the whole morphology seemed
coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves
and organs just examined held singular suggestions
of retrogression from forms still more complex.
Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly
prevalent. Altogether, little could be said
to have been solved; and Lake fell back on
mythology for a provisional name—jocosely
dubbing his finds “The Elder Ones”.
At about 2:30 A.M., having decided to postpone
further work and get a little rest, he covered
the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged
from the laboratory tent, and studied the
intact specimens with renewed interest. The
ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber
up their tissues a trifle, so that the head-points
and tubes of two or three shewed signs of
unfolding; but Lake did not believe there
was any danger of immediate decomposition
in the almost sub-zero air. He did, however,
move all the undissected specimens closer
together and throw a spare tent over them
in order to keep off the direct solar rays.
That would also help to keep their possible
scent away from the dogs, whose hostile unrest
was really becoming a problem even at their
substantial distance and behind the higher
and higher snow walls which an increased quota
of the men were hastening to raise around
their quarters. He had to weight down the
corners of the tent-cloth with heavy blocks
of snow to hold it in place amidst the rising
gale, for the titan mountains seemed about
to deliver some gravely severe blasts. Early
apprehensions about sudden antarctic winds
were revived, and under Atwood’s supervision
precautions were taken to bank the tents,
new dog-corral, and crude aëroplane shelters
with snow on the mountainward side. These
latter shelters, begun with hard snow blocks
during odd moments, were by no means as high
as they should have been; and Lake finally
detached all hands from other tasks to work
on them.
It was after four when Lake at last prepared
to sign off and advised us all to share the
rest period his outfit would take when the
shelter walls were a little higher. He held
some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether,
and repeated his praise of the really marvellous
drills that had helped him make his discovery.
Atwood also sent greetings and praises. I
gave Lake a warm word of congratulation, owning
up that he was right about the western trip;
and we all agreed to get in touch by wireless
at ten in the morning. If the gale was then
over, Lake would send a plane for the party
at my base. Just before retiring I despatched
a final message to the Arkham with instructions
about toning down the day’s news for the
outside world, since the full details seemed
radical enough to rouse a wave of incredulity
until further substantiated.
THREE
None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily
or continuously that morning; for both the
excitement of Lake’s discovery and the mounting
fury of the wind were against such a thing.
So savage was the blast, even where we were,
that we could not help wondering how much
worse it was at Lake’s camp, directly under
the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered
it. McTighe was awake at ten o’clock and
tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed,
but some electrical condition in the disturbed
air to the westward seemed to prevent communication.
We did, however, get the Arkham, and Douglas
told me that he had likewise been vainly trying
to reach Lake. He had not known about the
wind, for very little was blowing at McMurdo
Sound despite its persistent rage where we
were.
Throughout the day we all listened anxiously
and tried to get Lake at intervals, but invariably
without results. About noon a positive frenzy
of wind stampeded out of the west, causing
us to fear for the safety of our camp; but
it eventually died down, with only a moderate
relapse at 2 P.M. After three o’clock it
was very quiet, and we redoubled our efforts
to get Lake. Reflecting that he had four planes,
each provided with an excellent short-wave
outfit, we could not imagine any ordinary
accident capable of crippling all his wireless
equipment at once. Nevertheless the stony
silence continued; and when we thought of
the delirious force the wind must have had
in his locality we could not help making the
most direful conjectures.
By six o’clock our fears had become intense
and definite, and after a wireless consultation
with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to
take steps toward investigation. The fifth
aëroplane, which we had left at the McMurdo
Sound supply cache with Sherman and two sailors,
was in good shape and ready for instant use;
and it seemed that the very emergency for
which it had been saved was now upon us. I
got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to
join me with the plane and the two sailors
at the southern base as quickly as possible;
the air conditions being apparently highly
favourable. We then talked over the personnel
of the coming investigation party; and decided
that we would include all hands, together
with the sledge and dogs which I had kept
with me. Even so great a load would not be
too much for one of the huge planes built
to our especial orders for heavy machinery
transportation. At intervals I still tried
to reach Lake with the wireless, but all to
no purpose.
Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen,
took off at 7:30; and reported a quiet flight
from several points on the wing. They arrived
at our base at midnight, and all hands at
once discussed the next move. It was risky
business sailing over the antarctic in a single
aëroplane without any line of bases, but
no one drew back from what seemed like the
plainest necessity. We turned in at two o’clock
for a brief rest after some preliminary loading
of the plane, but were up again in four hours
to finish the loading and packing.
At 7:15 A.M., January 25th, we started flying
northwestward under McTighe’s pilotage with
ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and
food supply, and other items including the
plane’s wireless outfit. The atmosphere
was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild
in temperature; and we anticipated very little
trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude
designated by Lake as the site of his camp.
Our apprehensions were over what we might
find, or fail to find, at the end of our journey;
for silence continued to answer all calls
despatched to the camp.
Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour
flight is burned into my recollection because
of its crucial position in my life. It marked
my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all
that peace and balance which the normal mind
possesses through its accustomed conception
of external Nature and Nature’s laws. Thenceforward
the ten of us—but the student Danforth and
myself above all others—were to face a hideously
amplified world of lurking horrors which nothing
can erase from our emotions, and which we
would refrain from sharing with mankind in
general if we could. The newspapers have printed
the bulletins we sent from the moving plane;
telling of our non-stop course, our two battles
with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse
of the broken surface where Lake had sunk
his mid-journey shaft three days before, and
our sight of a group of those strange fluffy
snow-cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd
as rolling in the wind across the endless
leagues of frozen plateau. There came a point,
though, when our sensations could not be conveyed
in any words the press would understand; and
a later point when we had to adopt an actual
rule of strict censorship.
The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged
line of witch-like cones and pinnacles ahead,
and his shouts sent everyone to the windows
of the great cabined plane. Despite our speed,
they were very slow in gaining prominence;
hence we knew that they must be infinitely
far off, and visible only because of their
abnormal height. Little by little, however,
they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing
us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish
summits, and to catch the curious sense of
phantasy which they inspired as seen in the
reddish antarctic light against the provocative
background of iridescent ice-dust clouds.
In the whole spectacle there was a persistent,
pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential
revelation; as if these stark, nightmare spires
marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into
forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs
of remote time, space, and ultra-dimensionality.
I could not help feeling that they were evil
things—mountains of madness whose farther
slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate
abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud-background
held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal
beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial;
and gave appalling reminders of the utter
remoteness, separateness, desolation, and
aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed
austral world.
It was young Danforth who drew our notice
to the curious regularities of the higher
mountain skyline—regularities like clinging
fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had
mentioned in his messages, and which indeed
justified his comparison with the dream-like
suggestions of primordial temple-ruins on
cloudy Asian mountain-tops so subtly and strangely
painted by Roerich. There was indeed something
hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly
continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt
it in October when we first caught sight of
Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I
felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness
of Archaean mythical resemblances; of how
disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded
to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the
primal writings. Mythologists have placed
Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory
of man—or of his predecessors—is long,
and it may well be that certain tales have
come down from lands and mountains and temples
of horror earlier than Asia and earlier than
any human world we know. A few daring mystics
have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for
the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and
have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua
were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself.
Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood,
was not a region I would care to be in or
near; nor did I relish the proximity of a
world that had ever bred such ambiguous and
Archaean monstrosities as those Lake had just
mentioned. At the moment I felt sorry that
I had ever read the abhorred Necronomicon,
or talked so much with that unpleasantly erudite
folklorist Wilmarth at the university.
This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate
my reaction to the bizarre mirage which burst
upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith
as we drew near the mountains and began to
make out the cumulative undulations of the
foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages
during the preceding weeks, some of them quite
as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the
present sample; but this one had a wholly
novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism,
and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth
of fabulous walls and towers and minarets
loomed out of the troubled ice-vapours above
our heads.
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of
no architecture known to man or to human imagination,
with vast aggregations of night-black masonry
embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical
laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes
of sinister bizarrerie. There were truncated
cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted
by tall cylindrical shafts here and there
bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers
of thinnish scalloped discs; and strange,
beetling, table-like constructions suggesting
piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or
circular plates or five-pointed stars with
each one overlapping the one beneath. There
were composite cones and pyramids either alone
or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter
truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional
needle-like spires in curious clusters of
five. All of these febrile structures seemed
knit together by tubular bridges crossing
from one to the other at various dizzy heights,
and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying
and oppressive in its sheer giganticism. The
general type of mirage was not unlike some
of the wilder forms observed and drawn by
the Arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820; but at
this time and place, with those dark, unknown
mountain peaks soaring stupendously ahead,
that anomalous elder-world discovery in our
minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping
the greater part of our expedition, we all
seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity
and infinitely evil portent.
I was glad when the mirage began to break
up, though in the process the various nightmare
turrets and cones assumed distorted temporary
forms of even vaster hideousness. As the whole
illusion dissolved to churning opalescence
we began to look earthward again, and saw
that our journey’s end was not far off.
The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzyingly
up like a fearsome rampart of giants, their
curious regularities shewing with startling
clearness even without a field-glass. We were
over the lowest foothills now, and could see
amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of
their main plateau a couple of darkish spots
which we took to be Lake’s camp and boring.
The higher foothills shot up between five
and six miles away, forming a range almost
distinct from the terrifying line of more
than Himalayan peaks beyond them. At length
Ropes—the student who had relieved McTighe
at the controls—began to head downward toward
the left-hand dark spot whose size marked
it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe sent
out the last uncensored wireless message the
world was to receive from our expedition.
Everyone, of course, has read the brief and
unsatisfying bulletins of the rest of our
antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing
we sent a guarded report of the tragedy we
found, and reluctantly announced the wiping
out of the whole Lake party by the frightful
wind of the preceding day, or of the night
before that. Eleven known dead, young Gedney
missing. People pardoned our hazy lack of
details through realisation of the shock the
sad event must have caused us, and believed
us when we explained that the mangling action
of the wind had rendered all eleven bodies
unsuitable for transportation outside. Indeed,
I flatter myself that even in the midst of
our distress, utter bewilderment, and soul-clutching
horror, we scarcely went beyond the truth
in any specific instance. The tremendous significance
lies in what we dared not tell—what I would
not tell now but for the need of warning others
off from nameless terrors.
It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful
havoc. Whether all could have lived through
it, even without the other thing, is gravely
open to doubt. The storm, with its fury of
madly driven ice-particles, must have been
beyond anything our expedition had encountered
before. One aëroplane shelter—all, it seems,
had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate
state—was nearly pulverised; and the derrick
at the distant boring was entirely shaken
to pieces. The exposed metal of the grounded
planes and drilling machinery was bruised
into a high polish, and two of the small tents
were flattened despite their snow banking.
Wooden surfaces left out in the blast were
pitted and denuded of paint, and all signs
of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated.
It is also true that we found none of the
Archaean biological objects in a condition
to take outside as a whole. We did gather
some minerals from a vast tumbled pile, including
several of the greenish soapstone fragments
whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint
patterns of grouped dots caused so many doubtful
comparisons; and some fossil bones, among
which were the most typical of the curiously
injured specimens.
None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly
built snow enclosure near the camp being almost
wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that,
though the greater breakage on the side next
the camp, which was not the windward one,
suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic
beasts themselves. All three sledges were
gone, and we have tried to explain that the
wind may have blown them off into the unknown.
The drill and ice-melting machinery at the
boring were too badly damaged to warrant salvage,
so we used them to choke up that subtly disturbing
gateway to the past which Lake had blasted.
We likewise left at the camp the two most
shaken-up of the planes; since our surviving
party had only four real pilots—Sherman,
Danforth, McTighe, and Ropes—in all, with
Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate.
We brought back all the books, scientific
equipment, and other incidentals we could
find, though much was rather unaccountably
blown away. Spare tents and furs were either
missing or badly out of condition.
It was approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane
cruising had forced us to give Gedney up for
lost, that we sent our guarded message to
the Arkham for relaying; and I think we did
well to keep it as calm and non-committal
as we succeeded in doing. The most we said
about agitation concerned our dogs, whose
frantic uneasiness near the biological specimens
was to be expected from poor Lake’s accounts.
We did not mention, I think, their display
of the same uneasiness when sniffing around
the queer greenish soapstones and certain
other objects in the disordered region; objects
including scientific instruments, aëroplanes,
and machinery both at the camp and at the
boring, whose parts had been loosened, moved,
or otherwise tampered with by winds that must
have harboured singular curiosity and investigativeness.
About the fourteen biological specimens we
were pardonably indefinite. We said that the
only ones we discovered were damaged, but
that enough was left of them to prove Lake’s
description wholly and impressively accurate.
It was hard work keeping our personal emotions
out of this matter—and we did not mention
numbers or say exactly how we had found those
which we did find. We had by that time agreed
not to transmit anything suggesting madness
on the part of Lake’s men, and it surely
looked like madness to find six imperfect
monstrosities carefully buried upright in
nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds
punched over with groups of dots in patterns
exactly like those on the queer greenish soapstones
dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The
eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake
seemed to have been completely blown away.
We were careful, too, about the public’s
general peace of mind; hence Danforth and
I said little about that frightful trip over
the mountains the next day. It was the fact
that only a radically lightened plane could
possibly cross a range of such height which
mercifully limited that scouting tour to the
two of us. On our return at 1 A.M. Danforth
was close to hysterics, but kept an admirably
stiff upper lip. It took no persuasion to
make him promise not to shew our sketches
and the other things we brought away in our
pockets, not to say anything more to the others
than what we had agreed to relay outside,
and to hide our camera films for private development
later on; so that part of my present story
will be as new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes,
Sherman, and the rest as it will be to the
world in general. Indeed—Danforth is closer
mouthed than I; for he saw—or thinks he
saw—one thing he will not tell even me.
As all know, our report included a tale of
a hard ascent; a confirmation of Lake’s
opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean
slate and other very primal crumpled strata
unchanged since at least middle Comanchian
times; a conventional comment on the regularity
of the clinging cube and rampart formations;
a decision that the cave-mouths indicate dissolved
calcareous veins; a conjecture that certain
slopes and passes would permit of the scaling
and crossing of the entire range by seasoned
mountaineers; and a remark that the mysterious
other side holds a lofty and immense super-plateau
as ancient and unchanging as the mountains
themselves—20,000 feet in elevation, with
grotesque rock formations protruding through
a thin glacial layer and with low gradual
foothills between the general plateau surface
and the sheer precipices of the highest peaks.
This body of data is in every respect true
so far as it goes, and it completely satisfied
the men at the camp. We laid our absence of
sixteen hours—a longer time than our announced
flying, landing, reconnoitring, and rock-collecting
programme called for—to a long mythical
spell of adverse wind conditions; and told
truly of our landing on the farther foothills.
Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and
prosaic enough not to tempt any of the others
into emulating our flight. Had any tried to
do that, I would have used every ounce of
my persuasion to stop them—and I do not
know what Danforth would have done. While
we were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe,
and Williamson had worked like beavers over
Lake’s two best planes; fitting them again
for use despite the altogether unaccountable
juggling of their operative mechanism.
We decided to load all the planes the next
morning and start back for our old base as
soon as possible. Even though indirect, that
was the safest way to work toward McMurdo
Sound; for a straight-line flight across the
most utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-dead
continent would involve many additional hazards.
Further exploration was hardly feasible in
view of our tragic decimation and the ruin
of our drilling machinery; and the doubts
and horrors around us—which we did not reveal—made
us wish only to escape from this austral world
of desolation and brooding madness as swiftly
as we could.
As the public knows, our return to the world
was accomplished without further disasters.
All planes reached the old base on the evening
of the next day—January 27th—after a swift
non-stop flight; and on the 28th we made McMurdo
Sound in two laps, the one pause being very
brief, and occasioned by a faulty rudder in
the furious wind over the ice-shelf after
we had cleared the great plateau. In five
days more the Arkham and Miskatonic, with
all hands and equipment on board, were shaking
clear of the thickening field ice and working
up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of
Victoria Land looming westward against a troubled
antarctic sky and twisting the wind’s wails
into a wide-ranged musical piping which chilled
my soul to the quick. Less than a fortnight
later we left the last hint of polar land
behind us, and thanked heaven that we were
clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life
and death, space and time, have made black
and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs
since matter first writhed and swam on the
planet’s scarce-cooled crust.
Since our return we have all constantly worked
to discourage antarctic exploration, and have
kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves
with splendid unity and faithfulness. Even
young Danforth, with his nervous breakdown,
has not flinched or babbled to his doctors—indeed,
as I have said, there is one thing he thinks
he alone saw which he will not tell even me,
though I think it would help his psychological
state if he would consent to do so. It might
explain and relieve much, though perhaps the
thing was no more than the delusive aftermath
of an earlier shock. That is the impression
I gather after those rare irresponsible moments
when he whispers disjointed things to me—things
which he repudiates vehemently as soon as
he gets a grip on himself again.
It will be hard work deterring others from
the great white south, and some of our efforts
may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring
notice. We might have known from the first
that human curiosity is undying, and that
the results we announced would be enough to
spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit
of the unknown. Lake’s reports of those
biological monstrosities had aroused naturalists
and palaeontologists to the highest pitch;
though we were sensible enough not to shew
the detached parts we had taken from the actual
buried specimens, or our photographs of those
specimens as they were found. We also refrained
from shewing the more puzzling of the scarred
bones and greenish soapstones; while Danforth
and I have closely guarded the pictures we
took or drew on the super-plateau across the
range, and the crumpled things we smoothed,
studied in terror, and brought away in our
pockets. But now that Starkweather-Moore party
is organising, and with a thoroughness far
beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not
dissuaded, they will get to the innermost
nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore
till they bring up that which may end the
world we know. So I must break through all
reticences at last—even about that ultimate
nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.
FOUR
It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance
that I let my mind go back to Lake’s camp
and what we really found there—and to that
other thing beyond the frightful mountain
wall. I am constantly tempted to shirk the
details, and to let hints stand for actual
facts and ineluctable deductions. I hope I
have said enough already to let me glide briefly
over the rest; the rest, that is, of the horror
at the camp. I have told of the wind-ravaged
terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged
machinery, the varied uneasinesses of our
dogs, the missing sledges and other items,
the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of
Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological
specimens, strangely sound in texture for
all their structural injuries, from a world
forty million years dead. I do not recall
whether I mentioned that upon checking up
the canine bodies we found one dog missing.
We did not think much about that till later—indeed,
only Danforth and I have thought of it at
all.
The principal things I have been keeping back
relate to the bodies, and to certain subtle
points which may or may not lend a hideous
and incredible kind of rationale to the apparent
chaos. At the time I tried to keep the men’s
minds off those points; for it was so much
simpler—so much more normal—to lay everything
to an outbreak of madness on the part of some
of Lake’s party. From the look of things,
that daemon mountain wind must have been enough
to drive any man mad in the midst of this
centre of all earthly mystery and desolation.
The crowning abnormality, of course, was the
condition of the bodies—men and dogs alike.
They had all been in some terrible kind of
conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish
and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so
far as we could judge, had in each case come
from strangulation or laceration. The dogs
had evidently started the trouble, for the
state of their ill-built corral bore witness
to its forcible breakage from within. It had
been set some distance from the camp because
of the hatred of the animals for those hellish
Archaean organisms, but the precaution seemed
to have been taken in vain. When left alone
in that monstrous wind behind flimsy walls
of insufficient height they must have stampeded—whether
from the wind itself, or from some subtle,
increasing odour emitted by the nightmare
specimens, one could not say. Those specimens,
of course, had been covered with a tent-cloth;
yet the low antarctic sun had beat steadily
upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that
solar heat tended to make the strangely sound
and tough tissues of the things relax and
expand. Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth
from over them, and jostled them about in
such a way that their more pungent olfactory
qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable
antiquity.
But whatever had happened, it was hideous
and revolting enough. Perhaps I had better
put squeamishness aside and tell the worst
at last—though with a categorical statement
of opinion, based on the first-hand observations
and most rigid deductions of both Danforth
and myself, that the then missing Gedney was
in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors
we found. I have said that the bodies were
frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some
were incised and subtracted from in the most
curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion.
It was the same with dogs and men. All the
healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal,
had had their most solid masses of tissue
cut out and removed, as by a careful butcher;
and around them was a strange sprinkling of
salt—taken from the ravaged provision-chests
on the planes—which conjured up the most
horrible associations. The thing had occurred
in one of the crude aëroplane shelters from
which the plane had been dragged out, and
subsequent winds had effaced all tracks which
could have supplied any plausible theory.
Scattered bits of clothing, roughly slashed
from the human incision-subjects, hinted no
clues. It is useless to bring up the half-impression
of certain faint snow-prints in one shielded
corner of the ruined enclosure—because that
impression did not concern human prints at
all, but was clearly mixed up with all the
talk of fossil prints which poor Lake had
been giving throughout the preceding weeks.
One had to be careful of one’s imagination
in the lee of those overshadowing mountains
of madness.
As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned
out to be missing in the end. When we came
on that terrible shelter we had missed two
dogs and two men; but the fairly unharmed
dissecting tent, which we entered after investigating
the monstrous graves, had something to reveal.
It was not as Lake had left it, for the covered
parts of the primal monstrosity had been removed
from the improvised table. Indeed, we had
already realised that one of the six imperfect
and insanely buried things we had found—the
one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful
odour—must represent the collected sections
of the entity which Lake had tried to analyse.
On and around that laboratory table were strown
other things, and it did not take long for
us to guess that those things were the carefully
though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts
of one man and one dog. I shall spare the
feelings of survivors by omitting mention
of the man’s identity. Lake’s anatomical
instruments were missing, but there were evidences
of their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove
was also gone, though around it we found a
curious litter of matches. We buried the human
parts beside the other ten men, and the canine
parts with the other 35 dogs. Concerning the
bizarre smudges on the laboratory table, and
on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated
books scattered near it, we were much too
bewildered to speculate.
This formed the worst of the camp horror,
but other things were equally perplexing.
The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog,
the eight uninjured biological specimens,
the three sledges, and certain instruments,
illustrated technical and scientific books,
writing materials, electric torches and batteries,
food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents,
fur suits, and the like, was utterly beyond
sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed
ink-blots on certain pieces of paper, and
the evidences of curious alien fumbling and
experimentation around the planes and all
other mechanical devices both at the camp
and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor
this oddly disordered machinery. Then, too,
there was the upsetting of the larder, the
disappearance of certain staples, and the
jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried open
in the most unlikely ways and at the most
unlikely places. The profusion of scattered
matches, intact, broken, or spent, formed
another minor enigma; as did the two or three
tent-cloths and fur suits which we found lying
about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings
conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable
adaptations. The maltreatment of the human
and canine bodies, and the crazy burial of
the damaged Archaean specimens, were all of
a piece with this apparent disintegrative
madness. In view of just such an eventuality
as the present one, we carefully photographed
all the main evidences of insane disorder
at the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress
our pleas against the departure of the proposed
Starkweather-Moore Expedition.
Our first act after finding the bodies in
the shelter was to photograph and open the
row of insane graves with the five-pointed
snow mounds. We could not help noticing the
resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with
their clusters of grouped dots, to poor Lake’s
descriptions of the strange greenish soapstones;
and when we came on some of the soapstones
themselves in the great mineral pile we found
the likeness very close indeed. The whole
general formation, it must be made clear,
seemed abominably suggestive of the starfish-head
of the Archaean entities; and we agreed that
the suggestion must have worked potently upon
the sensitised minds of Lake’s overwrought
party. Our own first sight of the actual buried
entities formed a horrible moment, and sent
the imaginations of Pabodie and myself back
to some of the shocking primal myths we had
read and heard. We all agreed that the mere
sight and continued presence of the things
must have coöperated with the oppressive
polar solitude and daemon mountain wind in
driving Lake’s party mad.
For madness—centring in Gedney as the only
possible surviving agent—was the explanation
spontaneously adopted by everybody so far
as spoken utterance was concerned; though
I will not be so naive as to deny that each
of us may have harboured wild guesses which
sanity forbade him to formulate completely.
Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive
aëroplane cruise over all the surrounding
territory in the afternoon, sweeping the horizon
with field-glasses in quest of Gedney and
of the various missing things; but nothing
came to light. The party reported that the
titan barrier range extended endlessly to
right and left alike, without any diminution
in height or essential structure. On some
of the peaks, though, the regular cube and
rampart formations were bolder and plainer;
having doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted
Asian hill ruins. The distribution of cryptical
cave-mouths on the black snow-denuded summits
seemed roughly even as far as the range could
be traced.
In spite of all the prevailing horrors we
were left with enough sheer scientific zeal
and adventurousness to wonder about the unknown
realm beyond those mysterious mountains. As
our guarded messages stated, we rested at
midnight after our day of terror and bafflement;
but not without a tentative plan for one or
more range-crossing altitude flights in a
lightened plane with aërial camera and geologist’s
outfit, beginning the following morning. It
was decided that Danforth and I try it first,
and we awaked at 7 A.M. intending an early
trip; though heavy winds—mentioned in our
brief bulletin to the outside world—delayed
our start till nearly nine o’clock.
I have already repeated the non-committal
story we told the men at camp—and relayed
outside—after our return sixteen hours later.
It is now my terrible duty to amplify this
account by filling in the merciful blanks
with hints of what we really saw in the hidden
trans-montane world—hints of the revelations
which have finally driven Danforth to a nervous
collapse. I wish he would add a really frank
word about the thing which he thinks he alone
saw—even though it was probably a nervous
delusion—and which was perhaps the last
straw that put him where he is; but he is
firm against that. All I can do is to repeat
his later disjointed whispers about what set
him shrieking as the plane soared back through
the wind-tortured mountain pass after that
real and tangible shock which I shared. This
will form my last word. If the plain signs
of surviving elder horrors in what I disclose
be not enough to keep others from meddling
with the inner antarctic—or at least from
prying too deeply beneath the surface of that
ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and unhuman,
aeon-cursed desolation—the responsibility
for unnamable and perhaps immensurable evils
will not be mine.
Danforth and I, studying the notes made by
Pabodie in his afternoon flight and checking
up with a sextant, had calculated that the
lowest available pass in the range lay somewhat
to the right of us, within sight of camp,
and about 23,000 or 24,000 feet above sea-level.
For this point, then, we first headed in the
lightened plane as we embarked on our flight
of discovery. The camp itself, on foothills
which sprang from a high continental plateau,
was some 12,000 feet in altitude; hence the
actual height increase necessary was not so
vast as it might seem. Nevertheless we were
acutely conscious of the rarefied air and
intense cold as we rose; for on account of
visibility conditions we had to leave the
cabin windows open. We were dressed, of course,
in our heaviest furs.
As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark
and sinister above the line of crevasse-riven
snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed
more and more the curiously regular formations
clinging to the slopes; and thought again
of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas
Roerich. The ancient and wind-weathered rock
strata fully verified all of Lake’s bulletins,
and proved that these hoary pinnacles had
been towering up in exactly the same way since
a surprisingly early time in earth’s history—perhaps
over fifty million years. How much higher
they had once been, it was futile to guess;
but everything about this strange region pointed
to obscure atmospheric influences unfavourable
to change, and calculated to retard the usual
climatic processes of rock disintegration.
But it was the mountainside tangle of regular
cubes, ramparts, and cave-mouths which fascinated
and disturbed us most. I studied them with
a field-glass and took aërial photographs
whilst Danforth drove; and at times relieved
him at the controls—though my aviation knowledge
was purely an amateur’s—in order to let
him use the binoculars. We could easily see
that much of the material of the things was
a lightish Archaean quartzite, unlike any
formation visible over broad areas of the
general surface; and that their regularity
was extreme and uncanny to an extent which
poor Lake had scarcely hinted.
As he had said, their edges were crumbled
and rounded from untold aeons of savage weathering;
but their preternatural solidity and tough
material had saved them from obliteration.
Many parts, especially those closest to the
slopes, seemed identical in substance with
the surrounding rock surface. The whole arrangement
looked like the ruins of Machu Picchu in the
Andes, or the primal foundation-walls of Kish
as dug up by the Oxford–Field Museum Expedition
in 1929; and both Danforth and I obtained
that occasional impression of separate Cyclopean
blocks which Lake had attributed to his flight-companion
Carroll. How to account for such things in
this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt
queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations
often have strange regularities—like the
famous Giants’ Causeway in Ireland—but
this stupendous range, despite Lake’s original
suspicion of smoking cones, was above all
else non-volcanic in evident structure.
The curious cave-mouths, near which the odd
formations seemed most abundant, presented
another albeit a lesser puzzle because of
their regularity of outline. They were, as
Lake’s bulletin had said, often approximately
square or semicircular; as if the natural
orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry
by some magic hand. Their numerousness and
wide distribution were remarkable, and suggested
that the whole region was honeycombed with
tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata.
Such glimpses as we secured did not extend
far within the caverns, but we saw that they
were apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites.
Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes
adjoining the apertures seemed invariably
smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that
the slight cracks and pittings of the weathering
tended toward unusual patterns. Filled as
he was with the horrors and strangenesses
discovered at the camp, he hinted that the
pittings vaguely resembled those baffling
groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval
greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated
on the madly conceived snow mounds above those
six buried monstrosities.
We had risen gradually in flying over the
higher foothills and along toward the relatively
low pass we had selected. As we advanced we
occasionally looked down at the snow and ice
of the land route, wondering whether we could
have attempted the trip with the simpler equipment
of earlier days. Somewhat to our surprise
we saw that the terrain was far from difficult
as such things go; and that despite the crevasses
and other bad spots it would not have been
likely to deter the sledges of a Scott, a
Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers
appeared to lead up to wind-bared passes with
unusual continuity, and upon reaching our
chosen pass we found that its case formed
no exception.
Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared
to round the crest and peer out over an untrodden
world can hardly be described on paper; even
though we had no cause to think the regions
beyond the range essentially different from
those already seen and traversed. The touch
of evil mystery in these barrier mountains,
and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky
glimpsed betwixt their summits, was a highly
subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained
in literal words. Rather was it an affair
of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic
association—a thing mixed up with exotic
poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths
lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes.
Even the wind’s burden held a peculiar strain
of conscious malignity; and for a second it
seemed that the composite sound included a
bizarre musical whistling or piping over a
wide range as the blast swept in and out of
the omnipresent and resonant cave-mouths.
There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion
in this sound, as complex and unplaceable
as any of the other dark impressions.
We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height
of 23,570 feet according to the aneroid; and
had left the region of clinging snow definitely
below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock
slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers—but
with those provocative cubes, ramparts, and
echoing cave-mouths to add a portent of the
unnatural, the fantastic, and the dream-like.
Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought
I could see the one mentioned by poor Lake,
with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed to
be half-lost in a queer antarctic haze; such
a haze, perhaps, as had been responsible for
Lake’s early notion of volcanism. The pass
loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept
between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons.
Beyond it was a sky fretted with swirling
vapours and lighted by the low polar sun—the
sky of that mysterious farther realm upon
which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.
A few more feet of altitude and we would behold
that realm. Danforth and I, unable to speak
except in shouts amidst the howling, piping
wind that raced through the pass and added
to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged
eloquent glances. And then, having gained
those last few feet, we did indeed stare across
the momentous divide and over the unsampled
secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth.
FIVE
I think that both of us simultaneously cried
out in mixed awe, wonder, terror, and disbelief
in our own senses as we finally cleared the
pass and saw what lay beyond. Of course we
must have had some natural theory in the back
of our heads to steady our faculties for the
moment. Probably we thought of such things
as the grotesquely weathered stones of the
Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the fantastically
symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona
desert. Perhaps we even half thought the sight
a mirage like that we had seen the morning
before on first approaching those mountains
of madness. We must have had some such normal
notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept
that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and
grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal,
regular, and geometrically eurhythmic stone
masses which reared their crumbled and pitted
crests above a glacial sheet not more than
forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest,
and in places obviously thinner.
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable,
for some fiendish violation of known natural
law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on
a hellishly ancient table-land fully 20,000
feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation
since a pre-human age not less than 500,000
years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision’s
limit a tangle of orderly stone which only
the desperation of mental self-defence could
possibly attribute to any but a conscious
and artificial cause. We had previously dismissed,
so far as serious thought was concerned, any
theory that the cubes and ramparts of the
mountainsides were other than natural in origin.
How could they be otherwise, when man himself
could scarcely have been differentiated from
the great apes at the time when this region
succumbed to the present unbroken reign of
glacial death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably
shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of squared,
curved, and angled blocks had features which
cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very
clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage
in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality.
That damnable portent had had a material basis
after all—there had been some horizontal
stratum of ice-dust in the upper air, and
this shocking stone survival had projected
its image across the mountains according to
the simple laws of reflection. Of course the
phantom had been twisted and exaggerated,
and had contained things which the real source
did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real
source, we thought it even more hideous and
menacing than its distant image.
Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of
these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved
the frightful thing from utter annihilation
in the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of
years it had brooded there amidst the blasts
of a bleak upland. “Corona Mundi . . . Roof
of the World . . .” All sorts of fantastic
phrases sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily
down at the unbelievable spectacle. I thought
again of the eldritch primal myths that had
so persistently haunted me since my first
sight of this dead antarctic world—of the
daemoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or
Abominable Snow-Men of the Himalayas, of the
Pnakotic Manuscripts with their pre-human
implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of the
Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends
of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than
formless star-spawn associated with that semi-entity.
For boundless miles in every direction the
thing stretched off with very little thinning;
indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right
and left along the base of the low, gradual
foothills which separated it from the actual
mountain rim, we decided that we could see
no thinning at all except for an interruption
at the left of the pass through which we had
come. We had merely struck, at random, a limited
part of something of incalculable extent.
The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled
with grotesque stone structures, linking the
terrible city to the already familiar cubes
and ramparts which evidently formed its mountain
outposts. These latter, as well as the queer
cave-mouths, were as thick on the inner as
on the outer sides of the mountains.
The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for
the most part, of walls from 10 to 150 feet
in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying
from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly
of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate,
schist, and sandstone—blocks in many cases
as large as 4 × 6 × 8 feet—though in several
places it seemed to be carved out of a solid,
uneven bed-rock of pre-Cambrian slate. The
buildings were far from equal in size; there
being innumerable honeycomb-arrangements of
enormous extent as well as smaller separate
structures. The general shape of these things
tended to be conical, pyramidal, or terraced;
though there were many perfect cylinders,
perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other
rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling
of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground
plan roughly suggested modern fortifications.
The builders had made constant and expert
use of the principle of the arch, and domes
had probably existed in the city’s heyday.
The whole tangle was monstrously weathered,
and the glacial surface from which the towers
projected was strewn with fallen blocks and
immemorial debris. Where the glaciation was
transparent we could see the lower parts of
the gigantic piles, and noticed the ice-preserved
stone bridges which connected the different
towers at varying distances above the ground.
On the exposed walls we could detect the scarred
places where other and higher bridges of the
same sort had existed. Closer inspection revealed
countless largish windows; some of which were
closed with shutters of a petrified material
originally wood, though most gaped open in
a sinister and menacing fashion. Many of the
ruins, of course, were roofless, and with
uneven though wind-rounded upper edges; whilst
others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal
model or else protected by higher surrounding
structures, preserved intact outlines despite
the omnipresent crumbling and pitting. With
the field-glass we could barely make out what
seemed to be sculptural decorations in horizontal
bands—decorations including those curious
groups of dots whose presence on the ancient
soapstones now assumed a vastly larger significance.
In many places the buildings were totally
ruined and the ice-sheet deeply riven from
various geologic causes. In other places the
stonework was worn down to the very level
of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending
from the plateau’s interior to a cleft in
the foothills about a mile to the left of
the pass we had traversed, was wholly free
from buildings; and probably represented,
we concluded, the course of some great river
which in Tertiary times—millions of years
ago—had poured through the city and into
some prodigious subterranean abyss of the
great barrier range. Certainly, this was above
all a region of caves, gulfs, and underground
secrets beyond human penetration.
Looking back to our sensations, and recalling
our dazedness at viewing this monstrous survival
from aeons we had thought pre-human, I can
only wonder that we preserved the semblance
of equilibrium which we did. Of course we
knew that something—chronology, scientific
theory, or our own consciousness—was woefully
awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the
plane, observe many things quite minutely,
and take a careful series of photographs which
may yet serve both us and the world in good
stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habit
may have helped; for above all my bewilderment
and sense of menace there burned a dominant
curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret—to
know what sort of beings had built and lived
in this incalculably gigantic place, and what
relation to the general world of its time
or of other times so unique a concentration
of life could have had.
For this place could be no ordinary city.
It must have formed the primary nucleus and
centre of some archaic and unbelievable chapter
of earth’s history whose outward ramifications,
recalled only dimly in the most obscure and
distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst
the chaos of terrene convulsions long before
any human race we know had shambled out of
apedom. Here sprawled a palaeogean megalopolis
compared with which the fabled Atlantis and
Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoë
in the land of Lomar are recent things of
today—not even of yesterday; a megalopolis
ranking with such whispered pre-human blasphemies
as Valusia, R’lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar,
and the Nameless City of Arabia Deserta. As
we flew above that tangle of stark titan towers
my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds
and roved aimlessly in realms of fantastic
associations—even weaving links betwixt
this lost world and some of my own wildest
dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp.
The plane’s fuel-tank, in the interest of
greater lightness, had been only partly filled;
hence we now had to exert caution in our explorations.
Even so, however, we covered an enormous extent
of ground—or rather, air—after swooping
down to a level where the wind became virtually
negligible. There seemed to be no limit to
the mountain-range, or to the length of the
frightful stone city which bordered its inner
foothills. Fifty miles of flight in each direction
shewed no major change in the labyrinth of
rock and masonry that clawed up corpse-like
through the eternal ice. There were, though,
some highly absorbing diversifications; such
as the carvings on the canyon where that broad
river had once pierced the foothills and approached
its sinking-place in the great range. The
headlands at the stream’s entrance had been
boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons; and something
about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred
up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semi-remembrances
in both Danforth and me.
We also came upon several star-shaped open
spaces, evidently public squares; and noted
various undulations in the terrain. Where
a sharp hill rose, it was generally hollowed
out into some sort of rambling stone edifice;
but there were at least two exceptions. Of
these latter, one was too badly weathered
to disclose what had been on the jutting eminence,
while the other still bore a fantastic conical
monument carved out of the solid rock and
roughly resembling such things as the well-known
Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra.
Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered
that the city was not of infinite width, even
though its length along the foothills seemed
endless. After about thirty miles the grotesque
stone buildings began to thin out, and in
ten more miles we came to an unbroken waste
virtually without signs of sentient artifice.
The course of the river beyond the city seemed
marked by a broad depressed line; while the
land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness,
seeming to slope slightly upward as it receded
in the mist-hazed west.
So far we had made no landing, yet to leave
the plateau without an attempt at entering
some of the monstrous structures would have
been inconceivable. Accordingly we decided
to find a smooth place on the foothills near
our navigable pass, there grounding the plane
and preparing to do some exploration on foot.
Though these gradual slopes were partly covered
with a scattering of ruins, low flying soon
disclosed an ample number of possible landing-places.
Selecting that nearest to the pass, since
our next flight would be across the great
range and back to camp, we succeeded about
12:30 P.M. in coming down on a smooth, hard
snowfield wholly devoid of obstacles and well
adapted to a swift and favourable takeoff
later on.
It did not seem necessary to protect the plane
with a snow banking for so brief a time and
in so comfortable an absence of high winds
at this level; hence we merely saw that the
landing skis were safely lodged, and that
the vital parts of the mechanism were guarded
against the cold. For our foot journey we
discarded the heaviest of our flying furs,
and took with us a small outfit consisting
of pocket compass, hand camera, light provisions,
voluminous notebooks and paper, geologist’s
hammer and chisel, specimen-bags, coil of
climbing rope, and powerful electric torches
with extra batteries; this equipment having
been carried in the plane on the chance that
we might be able to effect a landing, take
ground pictures, make drawings and topographical
sketches, and obtain rock specimens from some
bare slope, outcropping, or mountain cave.
Fortunately we had a supply of extra paper
to tear up, place in a spare specimen-bag,
and use on the ancient principle of hare-and-hounds
for marking our course in any interior mazes
we might be able to penetrate. This had been
brought in case we found some cave system
with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid
and easy method in place of the usual rock-chipping
method of trail-blazing.
Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted
snow toward the stupendous stone labyrinth
that loomed against the opalescent west, we
felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels
as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed
mountain pass four hours previously. True,
we had become visually familiar with the incredible
secret concealed by the barrier peaks; yet
the prospect of actually entering primordial
walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millions
of years ago—before any known race of men
could have existed—was none the less awesome
and potentially terrible in its implications
of cosmic abnormality. Though the thinness
of the air at this prodigious altitude made
exertion somewhat more difficult than usual;
both Danforth and I found ourselves bearing
up very well, and felt equal to almost any
task which might fall to our lot. It took
only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless
ruin worn level with the snow, while ten or
fifteen rods farther on there was a huge roofless
rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed
outline and rising to an irregular height
of ten or eleven feet. For this latter we
headed; and when at last we were able actually
to touch its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we
felt that we had established an unprecedented
and almost blasphemous link with forgotten
aeons normally closed to our species.
This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps
300 feet from point to point, was built of
Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size,
averaging 6 × 8 feet in surface. There was
a row of arched loopholes or windows about
four feet wide and five feet high; spaced
quite symmetrically along the points of the
star and at its inner angles, and with the
bottoms about four feet from the glaciated
surface. Looking through these, we could see
that the masonry was fully five feet thick,
that there were no partitions remaining within,
and that there were traces of banded carvings
or bas-reliefs on the interior walls; facts
we had indeed guessed before, when flying
low over this rampart and others like it.
Though lower parts must have originally existed,
all traces of such things were now wholly
obscured by the deep layer of ice and snow
at this point.
We crawled through one of the windows and
vainly tried to decipher the nearly effaced
mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb
the glaciated floor. Our orientation flights
had indicated that many buildings in the city
proper were less ice-choked, and that we might
perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading
down to the true ground level if we entered
those structures still roofed at the top.
Before we left the rampart we photographed
it carefully, and studied its mortarless Cyclopean
masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished
that Pabodie were present, for his engineering
knowledge might have helped us guess how such
titanic blocks could have been handled in
that unbelievably remote age when the city
and its outskirts were built up.
The half-mile walk downhill to the actual
city, with the upper wind shrieking vainly
and savagely through the skyward peaks in
the background, was something whose smallest
details will always remain engraved on my
mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any
human beings but Danforth and me conceive
such optical effects. Between us and the churning
vapours of the west lay that monstrous tangle
of dark stone towers; its outré and incredible
forms impressing us afresh at every new angle
of vision. It was a mirage in solid stone,
and were it not for the photographs I would
still doubt that such a thing could be. The
general type of masonry was identical with
that of the rampart we had examined; but the
extravagant shapes which this masonry took
in its urban manifestations were past all
description.
Even the pictures illustrate only one or two
phases of its infinite bizarrerie, endless
variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly
alien exoticism. There were geometrical forms
for which an Euclid could scarcely find a
name—cones of all degrees of irregularity
and truncation; terraces of every sort of
provocative disproportion; shafts with odd
bulbous enlargements; broken columns in curious
groups; and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements
of mad grotesqueness. As we drew nearer we
could see beneath certain transparent parts
of the ice-sheet, and detect some of the tubular
stone bridges that connected the crazily sprinkled
structures at various heights. Of orderly
streets there seemed to be none, the only
broad open swath being a mile to the left,
where the ancient river had doubtless flowed
through the town into the mountains.
Our field-glasses shewed the external horizontal
bands of nearly effaced sculptures and dot-groups
to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine
what the city must once have looked like—even
though most of the roofs and tower-tops had
necessarily perished. As a whole, it had been
a complex tangle of twisted lanes and alleys;
all of them deep canyons, and some little
better than tunnels because of the overhanging
masonry or overarching bridges. Now, outspread
below us, it loomed like a dream-phantasy
against a westward mist through whose northern
end the low, reddish antarctic sun of early
afternoon was struggling to shine; and when
for a moment that sun encountered a denser
obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary
shadow, the effect was subtly menacing in
a way I can never hope to depict. Even the
faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind
in the great mountain passes behind us took
on a wilder note of purposeful malignity.
The last stage of our descent to the town
was unusually steep and abrupt, and a rock
outcropping at the edge where the grade changed
led us to think that an artificial terrace
had once existed there. Under the glaciation,
we believed, there must be a flight of steps
or its equivalent.
When at last we plunged into the labyrinthine
town itself, clambering over fallen masonry
and shrinking from the oppressive nearness
and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling
and pitted walls, our sensations again became
such that I marvel at the amount of self-control
we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy, and
began making some offensively irrelevant speculations
about the horror at the camp—which I resented
all the more because I could not help sharing
certain conclusions forced upon us by many
features of this morbid survival from nightmare
antiquity. The speculations worked on his
imagination, too; for in one place—where
a debris-littered alley turned a sharp corner—he
insisted that he saw faint traces of ground
markings which he did not like; whilst elsewhere
he stopped to listen to a subtle imaginary
sound from some undefined point—a muffled
musical piping, he said, not unlike that of
the wind in the mountain caves yet somehow
disturbingly different. The ceaseless five-pointedness
of the surrounding architecture and of the
few distinguishable mural arabesques had a
dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not
escape; and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious
certainty concerning the primal entities which
had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place.
Nevertheless our scientific and adventurous
souls were not wholly dead; and we mechanically
carried out our programme of chipping specimens
from all the different rock types represented
in the masonry. We wished a rather full set
in order to draw better conclusions regarding
the age of the place. Nothing in the great
outer walls seemed to date from later than
the Jurassic and Comanchian periods, nor was
any piece of stone in the entire place of
a greater recency than the Pliocene age. In
stark certainty, we were wandering amidst
a death which had reigned at least 500,000
years, and in all probability even longer.
As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed
twilight we stopped at all available apertures
to study interiors and investigate entrance
possibilities. Some were above our reach,
whilst others led only into ice-choked ruins
as unroofed and barren as the rampart on the
hill. One, though spacious and inviting, opened
on a seemingly bottomless abyss without visible
means of descent. Now and then we had a chance
to study the petrified wood of a surviving
shutter, and were impressed by the fabulous
antiquity implied in the still discernible
grain. These things had come from Mesozoic
gymnosperms and conifers—especially Cretaceous
cycads—and from fan-palms and early angiosperms
of plainly Tertiary date. Nothing definitely
later than the Pliocene could be discovered.
In the placing of these shutters—whose edges
shewed the former presence of queer and long-vanished
hinges—usage seemed to be varied; some being
on the outer and some on the inner side of
the deep embrasures. They seemed to have become
wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting
of their former and probably metallic fixtures
and fastenings.
After a time we came across a row of windows—in
the bulges of a colossal five-ridged cone
of undamaged apex—which led into a vast,
well-preserved room with stone flooring; but
these were too high in the room to permit
of descent without a rope. We had a rope with
us, but did not wish to bother with this twenty-foot
drop unless obliged to—especially in this
thin plateau air where great demands were
made upon the heart action. This enormous
room was probably a hall or concourse of some
sort, and our electric torches shewed bold,
distinct, and potentially startling sculptures
arranged round the walls in broad, horizontal
bands separated by equally broad strips of
conventional arabesques. We took careful note
of this spot, planning to enter here unless
a more easily gained interior were encountered.
Finally, though, we did encounter exactly
the opening we wished; an archway about six
feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former
end of an aërial bridge which had spanned
an alley about five feet above the present
level of glaciation. These archways, of course,
were flush with upper-story floors; and in
this case one of the floors still existed.
The building thus accessible was a series
of rectangular terraces on our left facing
westward. That across the alley, where the
other archway yawned, was a decrepit cylinder
with no windows and with a curious bulge about
ten feet above the aperture. It was totally
dark inside, and the archway seemed to open
on a well of illimitable emptiness.
Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast
left-hand building doubly easy, yet for a
moment we hesitated before taking advantage
of the long-wished chance. For though we had
penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery,
it required fresh resolution to carry us actually
inside a complete and surviving building of
a fabulous elder world whose nature was becoming
more and more hideously plain to us. In the
end, however, we made the plunge; and scrambled
up over the rubble into the gaping embrasure.
The floor beyond was of great slate slabs,
and seemed to form the outlet of a long, high
corridor with sculptured walls.
Observing the many inner archways which led
off from it, and realising the probable complexity
of the nest of apartments within, we decided
that we must begin our system of hare-and-hound
trail-blazing. Hitherto our compasses, together
with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain-range
between the towers in our rear, had been enough
to prevent our losing our way; but from now
on, the artificial substitute would be necessary.
Accordingly we reduced our extra paper to
shreds of suitable size, placed these in a
bag to be carried by Danforth, and prepared
to use them as economically as safety would
allow. This method would probably gain us
immunity from straying, since there did not
appear to be any strong air-currents inside
the primordial masonry. If such should develop,
or if our paper supply should give out, we
could of course fall back on the more secure
though more tedious and retarding method of
rock-chipping.
Just how extensive a territory we had opened
up, it was impossible to guess without a trial.
The close and frequent connexion of the different
buildings made it likely that we might cross
from one to another on bridges underneath
the ice except where impeded by local collapses
and geologic rifts, for very little glaciation
seemed to have entered the massive constructions.
Almost all the areas of transparent ice had
revealed the submerged windows as tightly
shuttered, as if the town had been left in
that uniform state until the glacial sheet
came to crystallise the lower part for all
succeeding time. Indeed, one gained a curious
impression that this place had been deliberately
closed and deserted in some dim, bygone aeon,
rather than overwhelmed by any sudden calamity
or even gradual decay. Had the coming of the
ice been foreseen, and had a nameless population
left en masse to seek a less doomed abode?
The precise physiographic conditions attending
the formation of the ice-sheet at this point
would have to wait for later solution. It
had not, very plainly, been a grinding drive.
Perhaps the pressure of accumulated snows
had been responsible; and perhaps some flood
from the river, or from the bursting of some
ancient glacial dam in the great range, had
helped to create the special state now observable.
Imagination could conceive almost anything
in connexion with this place.
SIX
It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive
account of our wanderings inside that cavernous,
aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry; that
monstrous lair of elder secrets which now
echoed for the first time, after uncounted
epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is
especially true because so much of the horrible
drama and revelation came from a mere study
of the omnipresent mural carvings. Our flashlight
photographs of those carvings will do much
toward proving the truth of what we are now
disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had
not a larger film supply with us. As it was,
we made crude notebook sketches of certain
salient features after all our films were
used up.
The building which we had entered was one
of great size and elaborateness, and gave
us an impressive notion of the architecture
of that nameless geologic past. The inner
partitions were less massive than the outer
walls, but on the lower levels were excellently
preserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving
curiously irregular differences in floor levels,
characterised the entire arrangement; and
we should certainly have been lost at the
very outset but for the trail of torn paper
left behind us. We decided to explore the
more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence
climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of
some 100 feet, to where the topmost tier of
chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open
to the polar sky. Ascent was effected over
the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps
or inclined planes which everywhere served
in lieu of stairs. The rooms we encountered
were of all imaginable shapes and proportions,
ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles
and perfect cubes. It might be safe to say
that their general average was about 30 × 30
feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height;
though many larger apartments existed. After
thoroughly examining the upper regions and
the glacial level we descended story by story
into the submerged part, where indeed we soon
saw we were in a continuous maze of connected
chambers and passages probably leading over
unlimited areas outside this particular building.
The Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism
of everything about us became curiously oppressive;
and there was something vaguely but deeply
unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions,
decorations, and constructional nuances of
the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon
realised from what the carvings revealed that
this monstrous city was many million years
old.
We cannot yet explain the engineering principles
used in the anomalous balancing and adjustment
of the vast rock masses, though the function
of the arch was clearly much relied on. The
rooms we visited were wholly bare of all portable
contents, a circumstance which sustained our
belief in the city’s deliberate desertion.
The prime decorative feature was the almost
universal system of mural sculpture; which
tended to run in continuous horizontal bands
three feet wide and arranged from floor to
ceiling in alternation with bands of equal
width given over to geometrical arabesques.
There were exceptions to this rule of arrangement,
but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often,
however, a series of smooth cartouches containing
oddly patterned groups of dots would be sunk
along one of the arabesque bands.
The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished,
and aesthetically evolved to the highest degree
of civilised mastery; though utterly alien
in every detail to any known art tradition
of the human race. In delicacy of execution
no sculpture I have ever seen could approach
it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation,
or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing
vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings;
whilst the conventional designs were marvels
of skilful intricacy. The arabesques displayed
a profound use of mathematical principles,
and were made up of obscurely symmetrical
curves and angles based on the quantity of
five. The pictorial bands followed a highly
formalised tradition, and involved a peculiar
treatment of perspective; but had an artistic
force that moved us profoundly notwithstanding
the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods.
Their method of design hinged on a singular
juxtaposition of the cross-section with the
two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an
analytical psychology beyond that of any known
race of antiquity. It is useless to try to
compare this art with any represented in our
museums. Those who see our photographs will
probably find its closest analogue in certain
grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists.
The arabesque tracery consisted altogether
of depressed lines whose depth on unweathered
walls varied from one to two inches. When
cartouches with dot-groups appeared—evidently
as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial
language and alphabet—the depression of
the smooth surface was perhaps an inch and
a half, and of the dots perhaps a half-inch
more. The pictorial bands were in counter-sunk
low relief, their background being depressed
about two inches from the original wall surface.
In some specimens marks of a former colouration
could be detected, though for the most part
the untold aeons had disintegrated and banished
any pigments which may have been applied.
The more one studied the marvellous technique
the more one admired the things. Beneath their
strict conventionalisation one could grasp
the minute and accurate observation and graphic
skill of the artists; and indeed, the very
conventions themselves served to symbolise
and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation
of every object delineated. We felt, too,
that besides these recognisable excellences
there were others lurking beyond the reach
of our perceptions. Certain touches here and
there gave vague hints of latent symbols and
stimuli which another mental and emotional
background, and a fuller or different sensory
equipment, might have made of profound and
poignant significance to us.
The subject-matter of the sculptures obviously
came from the life of the vanished epoch of
their creation, and contained a large proportion
of evident history. It is this abnormal historic-mindedness
of the primal race—a chance circumstance
operating, through coincidence, miraculously
in our favour—which made the carvings so
awesomely informative to us, and which caused
us to place their photography and transcription
above all other considerations. In certain
rooms the dominant arrangement was varied
by the presence of maps, astronomical charts,
and other scientific designs on an enlarged
scale—these things giving a naive and terrible
corroboration to what we gathered from the
pictorial friezes and dadoes. In hinting at
what the whole revealed, I can only hope that
my account will not arouse a curiosity greater
than sane caution on the part of those who
believe me at all. It would be tragic if any
were to be allured to that realm of death
and horror by the very warning meant to discourage
them.
Interrupting these sculptured walls were high
windows and massive twelve-foot doorways;
both now and then retaining the petrified
wooden planks—elaborately carved and polished—of
the actual shutters and doors. All metal fixtures
had long ago vanished, but some of the doors
remained in place and had to be forced aside
as we progressed from room to room. Window-frames
with odd transparent panes—mostly elliptical—survived
here and there, though in no considerable
quantity. There were also frequent niches
of great magnitude, generally empty, but once
in a while containing some bizarre object
carved from green soapstone which was either
broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant
removal. Other apertures were undoubtedly
connected with bygone mechanical facilities—heating,
lighting, and the like—of a sort suggested
in many of the carvings. Ceilings tended to
be plain, but had sometimes been inlaid with
green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen
now. Floors were also paved with such tiles,
though plain stonework predominated.
As I have said, all furniture and other moveables
were absent; but the sculptures gave a clear
idea of the strange devices which had once
filled these tomb-like, echoing rooms. Above
the glacial sheet the floors were generally
thick with detritus, litter, and debris; but
farther down this condition decreased. In
some of the lower chambers and corridors there
was little more than gritty dust or ancient
incrustations, while occasional areas had
an uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness.
Of course, where rifts or collapses had occurred,
the lower levels were as littered as the upper
ones. A central court—as in other structures
we had seen from the air—saved the inner
regions from total darkness; so that we seldom
had to use our electric torches in the upper
rooms except when studying sculptured details.
Below the ice-cap, however, the twilight deepened;
and in many parts of the tangled ground level
there was an approach to absolute blackness.
To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts
and feelings as we penetrated this aeon-silent
maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate
a hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive
moods, memories, and impressions. The sheer
appalling antiquity and lethal desolation
of the place were enough to overwhelm almost
any sensitive person, but added to these elements
were the recent unexplained horror at the
camp, and the revelations all too soon effected
by the terrible mural sculptures around us.
The moment we came upon a perfect section
of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation
could exist, it took only a brief study to
give us the hideous truth—a truth which
it would be naive to claim Danforth and I
had not independently suspected before, though
we had carefully refrained from even hinting
it to each other. There could now be no further
merciful doubt about the nature of the beings
which had built and inhabited this monstrous
dead city millions of years ago, when man’s
ancestors were primitive archaic mammals,
and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes
of Europe and Asia.
We had previously clung to a desperate alternative
and insisted—each to himself—that the
omnipresence of the five-pointed motif meant
only some cultural or religious exaltation
of the Archaean natural object which had so
patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness;
as the decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted
the sacred bull, those of Egypt the scarabaeus,
those of Rome the wolf and the eagle, and
those of various savage tribes some chosen
totem-animal. But this lone refuge was now
stripped from us, and we were forced to face
definitely the reason-shaking realisation
which the reader of these pages has doubtless
long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear
to write it down in black and white even now,
but perhaps that will not be necessary.
The things once rearing and dwelling in this
frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs
were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse.
Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless
objects—but the builders of the city were
wise and old, and had left certain traces
in rocks even then laid down well-nigh a thousand
million years . . . rocks laid down before
the true life of earth had advanced beyond
plastic groups of cells . . . rocks laid down
before the true life of earth had existed
at all. They were the makers and enslavers
of that life, and above all doubt the originals
of the fiendish elder myths which things like
the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon
affrightedly hint about. They were the Great
Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars
when earth was young—the beings whose substance
an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers
were such as this planet had never bred. And
to think that only the day before Danforth
and I had actually looked upon fragments of
their millennially fossilised substance . . . and
that poor Lake and his party had seen their
complete outlines. . . .
It is of course impossible for me to relate
in proper order the stages by which we picked
up what we know of that monstrous chapter
of pre-human life. After the first shock of
the certain revelation we had to pause a while
to recuperate, and it was fully three o’clock
before we got started on our actual tour of
systematic research. The sculptures in the
building we entered were of relatively late
date—perhaps two million years ago—as
checked up by geological, biological, and
astronomical features; and embodied an art
which would be called decadent in comparison
with that of specimens we found in older buildings
after crossing bridges under the glacial sheet.
One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed
to go back forty or possibly even fifty million
years—to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous—and
contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing
anything else, with one tremendous exception,
that we encountered. That was, we have since
agreed, the oldest domestic structure we traversed.
Were it not for the support of those flashlights
soon to be made public, I would refrain from
telling what I found and inferred, lest I
be confined as a madman. Of course, the infinitely
early parts of the patchwork tale—representing
the pre-terrestrial life of the star-headed
beings on other planets, and in other galaxies,
and in other universes—can readily be interpreted
as the fantastic mythology of those beings
themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved
designs and diagrams so uncannily close to
the latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics
that I scarcely know what to think. Let others
judge when they see the photographs I shall
publish.
Naturally, no one set of carvings which we
encountered told more than a fraction of any
connected story; nor did we even begin to
come upon the various stages of that story
in their proper order. Some of the vast rooms
were independent units so far as their designs
were concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous
chronicle would be carried through a series
of rooms and corridors. The best of the maps
and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful
abyss below even the ancient ground level—a
cavern perhaps 200 feet square and sixty feet
high, which had almost undoubtedly been an
educational centre of some sort. There were
many provoking repetitions of the same material
in different rooms and buildings; since certain
chapters of experience, and certain summaries
or phases of racial history, had evidently
been favourites with different decorators
or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions
of the same theme proved useful in settling
debatable points and filling in gaps.
I still wonder that we deduced so much in
the short time at our disposal. Of course,
we even now have only the barest outline;
and much of that was obtained later on from
a study of the photographs and sketches we
made. It may be the effect of this later study—the
revived memories and vague impressions acting
in conjunction with his general sensitiveness
and with that final supposed horror-glimpse
whose essence he will not reveal even to me—which
has been the immediate source of Danforth’s
present breakdown. But it had to be; for we
could not issue our warning intelligently
without the fullest possible information,
and the issuance of that warning is a prime
necessity. Certain lingering influences in
that unknown antarctic world of disordered
time and alien natural law make it imperative
that further exploration be discouraged.
SEVEN
The full story, so far as deciphered, will
shortly appear in an official bulletin of
Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch
only the salient high lights in a formless,
rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the sculptures
told of the coming of those star-headed things
to the nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic
space—their coming, and the coming of many
other alien entities such as at certain times
embark upon spatial pioneering. They seemed
able to traverse the interstellar ether on
their vast membraneous wings—thus oddly
confirming some curious hill folklore long
ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. They
had lived under the sea a good deal, building
fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles
with nameless adversaries by means of intricate
devices employing unknown principles of energy.
Evidently their scientific and mechanical
knowledge far surpassed man’s today, though
they made use of its more widespread and elaborate
forms only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures
suggested that they had passed through a stage
of mechanised life on other planets, but had
receded upon finding its effects emotionally
unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness
of organisation and simplicity of natural
wants made them peculiarly able to live on
a high plane without the more specialised
fruits of artificial manufacture, and even
without garments except for occasional protection
against the elements.
It was under the sea, at first for food and
later for other purposes, that they first
created earth-life—using available substances
according to long-known methods. The more
elaborate experiments came after the annihilation
of various cosmic enemies. They had done the
same thing on other planets; having manufactured
not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular
protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their
tissues into all sorts of temporary organs
under hypnotic influence and thereby forming
ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of
the community. These viscous masses were without
doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about
as the “shoggoths” in his frightful Necronomicon,
though even that mad Arab had not hinted that
any existed on earth except in the dreams
of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal
herb. When the star-headed Old Ones on this
planet had synthesised their simple food forms
and bred a good supply of shoggoths, they
allowed other cell-groups to develop into
other forms of animal and vegetable life for
sundry purposes; extirpating any whose presence
became troublesome.
With the aid of the shoggoths, whose expansions
could be made to lift prodigious weights,
the small, low cities under the sea grew to
vast and imposing labyrinths of stone not
unlike those which later rose on land. Indeed,
the highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much
on land in other parts of the universe, and
probably retained many traditions of land
construction. As we studied the architecture
of all these sculptured palaeogean cities,
including that whose aeon-dead corridors we
were even then traversing, we were impressed
by a curious coincidence which we have not
yet tried to explain, even to ourselves. The
tops of the buildings, which in the actual
city around us had of course been weathered
into shapeless ruins ages ago, were clearly
displayed in the bas-reliefs; and shewed vast
clusters of needle-like spires, delicate finials
on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers
of thin, horizontal scalloped discs capping
cylindrical shafts. This was exactly what
we had seen in that monstrous and portentous
mirage, cast by a dead city whence such skyline
features had been absent for thousands and
tens of thousands of years, which loomed on
our ignorant eyes across the unfathomed mountains
of madness as we first approached poor Lake’s
ill-fated camp.
Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the
sea and after part of them migrated to land,
volumes could be written. Those in shallow
water had continued the fullest use of the
eyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles,
and had practiced the arts of sculpture and
of writing in quite the usual way—the writing
accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen
surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths,
though they used a curious phosphorescent
organism to furnish light, pieced out their
vision with obscure special senses operating
through the prismatic cilia on their heads—senses
which rendered all the Old Ones partly independent
of light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture
and writing had changed curiously during the
descent, embodying certain apparently chemical
coating processes—probably to secure phosphorescence—which
the bas-reliefs could not make clear to us.
The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming—using
the lateral crinoid arms—and partly by wriggling
with the lower tier of tentacles containing
the pseudo-feet. Occasionally they accomplished
long swoops with the auxiliary use of two
or more sets of their fan-like folding wings.
On land they locally used the pseudo-feet,
but now and then flew to great heights or
over long distances with their wings. The
many slender tentacles into which the crinoid
arms branched were infinitely delicate, flexible,
strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coördination;
ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in
all artistic and other manual operations.
The toughness of the things was almost incredible.
Even the terrific pressures of the deepest
sea-bottoms appeared powerless to harm them.
Very few seemed to die at all except by violence,
and their burial-places were very limited.
The fact that they covered their vertically
inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds
set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made
a fresh pause and recuperation necessary after
the sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied
by means of spores—like vegetable pteridophytes
as Lake had suspected—but owing to their
prodigious toughness and longevity, and consequent
lack of replacement needs, they did not encourage
the large-scale development of new prothalli
except when they had new regions to colonise.
The young matured swiftly, and received an
education evidently beyond any standard we
can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and
aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced
a tenaciously enduring set of customs and
institutions which I shall describe more fully
in my coming monograph. These varied slightly
according to sea or land residence, but had
the same foundations and essentials.
Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment
from inorganic substances; they vastly preferred
organic and especially animal food. They ate
uncooked marine life under the sea, but cooked
their viands on land. They hunted game and
raised meat herds—slaughtering with sharp
weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil
bones our expedition had noted. They resisted
all ordinary temperatures marvellously; and
in their natural state could live in water
down to freezing. When the great chill of
the Pleistocene drew on, however—nearly
a million years ago—the land dwellers had
to resort to special measures including artificial
heating; until at last the deadly cold appears
to have driven them back into the sea. For
their prehistoric flights through cosmic space,
legend said, they had absorbed certain chemicals
and became almost independent of eating, breathing,
or heat conditions; but by the time of the
great cold they had lost track of the method.
In any case they could not have prolonged
the artificial state indefinitely without
harm.
Being non-pairing and semi-vegetable in structure,
the Old Ones had no biological basis for the
family phase of mammal life; but seemed to
organise large households on the principles
of comfortable space-utility and—as we deduced
from the pictured occupations and diversions
of co-dwellers—congenial mental association.
In furnishing their homes they kept everything
in the centre of the huge rooms, leaving all
the wall spaces free for decorative treatment.
Lighting, in the case of the land inhabitants,
was accomplished by a device probably electro-chemical
in nature. Both on land and under water they
used curious tables, chairs, and couches like
cylindrical frames—for they rested and slept
upright with folded-down tentacles—and racks
for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming
their books.
Government was evidently complex and probably
socialistic, though no certainties in this
regard could be deduced from the sculptures
we saw. There was extensive commerce, both
local and between different cities; certain
small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed,
serving as money. Probably the smaller of
the various greenish soapstones found by our
expedition were pieces of such currency. Though
the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture
and much stock-raising existed. Mining and
a limited amount of manufacturing were also
practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent
migration seemed relatively rare except for
the vast colonising movements by which the
race expanded. For personal locomotion no
external aid was used; since in land, air,
and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed
to possess excessively vast capacities for
speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts
of burden—shoggoths under the sea, and a
curious variety of primitive vertebrates in
the later years of land existence.
These vertebrates, as well as an infinity
of other life-forms—animal and vegetable,
marine, terrestrial, and aërial—were the
products of unguided evolution acting on life-cells
made by the Old Ones but escaping beyond their
radius of attention. They had been suffered
to develop unchecked because they had not
come in conflict with the dominant beings.
Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically
exterminated. It interested us to see in some
of the very last and most decadent sculptures
a shambling primitive mammal, used sometimes
for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon
by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian
and human foreshadowings were unmistakable.
In the building of land cities the huge stone
blocks of the high towers were generally lifted
by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore
unknown to palaeontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived
various geologic changes and convulsions of
the earth’s crust was little short of miraculous.
Though few or none of their first cities seem
to have remained beyond the Archaean age,
there was no interruption in their civilisation
or in the transmission of their records. Their
original place of advent to the planet was
the Antarctic Ocean, and it is likely that
they came not long after the matter forming
the moon was wrenched from the neighbouring
South Pacific. According to one of the sculptured
maps, the whole globe was then under water,
with stone cities scattered farther and farther
from the antarctic as aeons passed. Another
map shews a vast bulk of dry land around the
south pole, where it is evident that some
of the beings made experimental settlements
though their main centres were transferred
to the nearest sea-bottom. Later maps, which
display this land mass as cracking and drifting,
and sending certain detached parts northward,
uphold in a striking way the theories of continental
drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener,
and Joly.
With the upheaval of new land in the South
Pacific tremendous events began. Some of the
marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet
that was not the worst misfortune. Another
race—a land race of beings shaped like octopi
and probably corresponding to the fabulous
pre-human spawn of Cthulhu—soon began filtering
down from cosmic infinity and precipitated
a monstrous war which for a time drove the
Old Ones wholly back to the sea—a colossal
blow in view of the increasing land settlements.
Later peace was made, and the new lands were
given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old
Ones held the sea and the older lands. New
land cities were founded—the greatest of
them in the antarctic, for this region of
first arrival was sacred. From then on, as
before, the antarctic remained the centre
of the Old Ones’ civilisation, and all the
discoverable cities built there by the Cthulhu
spawn were blotted out. Then suddenly the
lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with
them the frightful stone city of R’lyeh
and all the cosmic octopi, so that the Old
Ones were again supreme on the planet except
for one shadowy fear about which they did
not like to speak. At a rather later age their
cities dotted all the land and water areas
of the globe—hence the recommendation in
my coming monograph that some archaeologist
make systematic borings with Pabodie’s type
of apparatus in certain widely separated regions.
The steady trend down the ages was from water
to land; a movement encouraged by the rise
of new land masses, though the ocean was never
wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward
movement was the new difficulty in breeding
and managing the shoggoths upon which successful
sea-life depended. With the march of time,
as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art
of creating new life from inorganic matter
had been lost; so that the Old Ones had to
depend on the moulding of forms already in
existence. On land the great reptiles proved
highly tractable; but the shoggoths of the
sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring
a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence,
presented for a time a formidable problem.
They had always been controlled through the
hypnotic suggestion of the Old Ones, and had
modelled their tough plasticity into various
useful temporary limbs and organs; but now
their self-modelling powers were sometimes
exercised independently, and in various imitative
forms implanted by past suggestion. They had,
it seems, developed a semi-stable brain whose
separate and occasionally stubborn volition
echoed the will of the Old Ones without always
obeying it. Sculptured images of these shoggoths
filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing.
They were normally shapeless entities composed
of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination
of bubbles; and each averaged about fifteen
feet in diameter when a sphere. They had,
however, a constantly shifting shape and volume;
throwing out temporary developments or forming
apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech
in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously
or according to suggestion.
They seem to have become peculiarly intractable
toward the middle of the Permian age, perhaps
150 million years ago, when a veritable war
of re-subjugation was waged upon them by the
marine Old Ones. Pictures of this war, and
of the headless, slime-coated fashion in which
the shoggoths typically left their slain victims,
held a marvellously fearsome quality despite
the intervening abyss of untold ages. The
Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular
disturbance against the rebel entities, and
in the end had achieved a complete victory.
Thereafter the sculptures shewed a period
in which shoggoths were tamed and broken by
armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American
west were tamed by cowboys. Though during
the rebellion the shoggoths had shewn an ability
to live out of water, this transition was
not encouraged; since their usefulness on
land would hardly have been commensurate with
the trouble of their management.
During the Jurassic age the Old Ones met fresh
adversity in the form of a new invasion from
outer space—this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean
creatures from a planet identifiable as the
remote and recently discovered Pluto; creatures
undoubtedly the same as those figuring in
certain whispered hill legends of the north,
and remembered in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go,
or Abominable Snow-Men. To fight these beings
the Old Ones attempted, for the first time
since their terrene advent, to sally forth
again into the planetary ether; but despite
all traditional preparations found it no longer
possible to leave the earth’s atmosphere.
Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel
had been, it was now definitely lost to the
race. In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones
out of all the northern lands, though they
were powerless to disturb those in the sea.
Little by little the slow retreat of the elder
race to their original antarctic habitat was
beginning.
It was curious to note from the pictured battles
that both the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go
seem to have been composed of matter more
widely different from that which we know than
was the substance of the Old Ones. They were
able to undergo transformations and reintegrations
impossible for their adversaries, and seem
therefore to have originally come from even
remoter gulfs of cosmic space. The Old Ones,
but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar
vital properties, were strictly material,
and must have had their absolute origin within
the known space-time continuum; whereas the
first sources of the other beings can only
be guessed at with bated breath. All this,
of course, assuming that the non-terrestrial
linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the
invading foes are not pure mythology. Conceivably,
the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic
framework to account for their occasional
defeats; since historical interest and pride
obviously formed their chief psychological
element. It is significant that their annals
failed to mention many advanced and potent
races of beings whose mighty cultures and
towering cities figure persistently in certain
obscure legends.
The changing state of the world through long
geologic ages appeared with startling vividness
in many of the sculptured maps and scenes.
In certain cases existing science will require
revision, while in other cases its bold deductions
are magnificently confirmed. As I have said,
the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly
that all the continents are fragments of an
original antarctic land mass which cracked
from centrifugal force and drifted apart over
a technically viscous lower surface—an hypothesis
suggested by such things as the complementary
outlines of Africa and South America, and
the way the great mountain chains are rolled
and shoved up—receives striking support
from this uncanny source.
Maps evidently shewing the Carboniferous world
of an hundred million or more years ago displayed
significant rifts and chasms destined later
to separate Africa from the once continuous
realms of Europe (then the Valusia of hellish
primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the
antarctic continent. Other charts—and most
significantly one in connexion with the founding
fifty million years ago of the vast dead city
around us—shewed all the present continents
well differentiated. And in the latest discoverable
specimen—dating perhaps from the Pliocene
age—the approximate world of today appeared
quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska
with Siberia, of North America with Europe
through Greenland, and of South America with
the antarctic continent through Graham Land.
In the Carboniferous map the whole globe—ocean
floor and rifted land mass alike—bore symbols
of the Old Ones’ vast stone cities, but
in the later charts the gradual recession
toward the antarctic became very plain. The
final Pliocene specimen shewed no land cities
except on the antarctic continent and the
tip of South America, nor any ocean cities
north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude.
Knowledge and interest in the northern world,
save for a study of coast-lines probably made
during long exploration flights on those fan-like
membraneous wings, had evidently declined
to zero among the Old Ones.
Destruction of cities through the upthrust
of mountains, the centrifugal rending of continents,
the seismic convulsions of land or sea-bottom,
and other natural causes was a matter of common
record; and it was curious to observe how
fewer and fewer replacements were made as
the ages wore on. The vast dead megalopolis
that yawned around us seemed to be the last
general centre of the race; built early in
the Cretaceous age after a titanic earth-buckling
had obliterated a still vaster predecessor
not far distant. It appeared that this general
region was the most sacred spot of all, where
reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on
a primal sea-bottom. In the new city—many
of whose features we could recognise in the
sculptures, but which stretched fully an hundred
miles along the mountain-range in each direction
beyond the farthest limits of our aërial
survey—there were reputed to be preserved
certain sacred stones forming part of the
first sea-bottom city, which were thrust up
to light after long epochs in the course of
the general crumpling of strata.
EIGHT
Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial
interest and a peculiarly personal sense of
awe everything pertaining to the immediate
district in which we were. Of this local material
there was naturally a vast abundance; and
on the tangled ground level of the city we
were lucky enough to find a house of very
late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged
by a neighbouring rift, contained sculptures
of decadent workmanship carrying the story
of the region much beyond the period of the
Pliocene map whence we derived our last general
glimpse of the pre-human world. This was the
last place we examined in detail, since what
we found there gave us a fresh immediate objective.
Certainly, we were in one of the strangest,
weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners
of earth’s globe. Of all existing lands
it was infinitely the most ancient; and the
conviction grew upon us that this hideous
upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare
plateau of Leng which even the mad author
of the Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss.
The great mountain chain was tremendously
long—starting as a low range at Luitpold
Land on the coast of Weddell Sea and virtually
crossing the entire continent. The really
high part stretched in a mighty arc from about
Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude
70°, E. Longitude 115°, with its concave
side toward our camp and its seaward end in
the region of that long, ice-locked coast
whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mawson
at the Antarctic Circle.
Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of Nature
seemed disturbingly close at hand. I have
said that these peaks are higher than the
Himalayas, but the sculptures forbid me to
say that they are earth’s highest. That
grim honour is beyond doubt reserved for something
which half the sculptures hesitated to record
at all, whilst others approached it with obvious
repugnance and trepidation. It seems that
there was one part of the ancient land—the
first part that ever rose from the waters
after the earth had flung off the moon and
the Old Ones had seeped down from the stars—which
had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelessly
evil. Cities built there had crumbled before
their time, and had been found suddenly deserted.
Then when the first great earth-buckling had
convulsed the region in the Comanchian age,
a frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly
up amidst the most appalling din and chaos—and
earth had received her loftiest and most terrible
mountains.
If the scale of the carvings was correct,
these abhorred things must have been much
over 40,000 feet high—radically vaster than
even the shocking mountains of madness we
had crossed. They extended, it appeared, from
about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to
Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 100°—less than
300 miles away from the dead city, so that
we would have spied their dreaded summits
in the dim western distance had it not been
for that vague opalescent haze. Their northern
end must likewise be visible from the long
Antarctic Circle coast-line at Queen Mary
Land.
Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days,
had made strange prayers to those mountains;
but none ever went near them or dared to guess
what lay beyond. No human eye had ever seen
them, and as I studied the emotions conveyed
in the carvings I prayed that none ever might.
There are protecting hills along the coast
beyond them—Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm
Lands—and I thank heaven no one has been
able to land and climb those hills. I am not
as sceptical about old tales and fears as
I used to be, and I do not laugh now at the
pre-human sculptor’s notion that lightning
paused meaningfully now and then at each of
the brooding crests, and that an unexplained
glow shone from one of those terrible pinnacles
all through the long polar night. There may
be a very real and very monstrous meaning
in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath
in the Cold Waste.
But the terrain close at hand was hardly less
strange, even if less namelessly accursed.
Soon after the founding of the city the great
mountain-range became the seat of the principal
temples, and many carvings shewed what grotesque
and fantastic towers had pierced the sky where
now we saw only the curiously clinging cubes
and ramparts. In the course of ages the caves
had appeared, and had been shaped into adjuncts
of the temples. With the advance of still
later epochs all the limestone veins of the
region were hollowed out by ground waters,
so that the mountains, the foothills, and
the plains below them were a veritable network
of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic
sculptures told of explorations deep underground,
and of the final discovery of the Stygian
sunless sea that lurked at earth’s bowels.
This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been
worn by the great river which flowed down
from the nameless and horrible westward mountains,
and which had formerly turned at the base
of the Old Ones’ range and flowed beside
that chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd
and Totten Lands on Wilkes’s coast-line.
Little by little it had eaten away the limestone
hill base at its turning, till at last its
sapping currents reached the caverns of the
ground waters and joined with them in digging
a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk emptied
into the hollow hills and left the old bed
toward the ocean dry. Much of the later city
as we now found it had been built over that
former bed. The Old Ones, understanding what
had happened, and exercising their always
keen artistic sense, had carved into ornate
pylons those headlands of the foothills where
the great stream began its descent into eternal
darkness.
This river, once crossed by scores of noble
stone bridges, was plainly the one whose extinct
course we had seen in our aëroplane survey.
Its position in different carvings of the
city helped us to orient ourselves to the
scene as it had been at various stages of
the region’s age-long, aeon-dead history;
so that we were able to sketch a hasty but
careful map of the salient features—squares,
important buildings, and the like—for guidance
in further explorations. We could soon reconstruct
in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it
was a million or ten million or fifty million
years ago, for the sculptures told us exactly
what the buildings and mountains and squares
and suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant
Tertiary vegetation had looked like. It must
have had a marvellous and mystic beauty, and
as I thought of it I almost forgot the clammy
sense of sinister oppression with which the
city’s inhuman age and massiveness and deadness
and remoteness and glacial twilight had choked
and weighed on my spirit. Yet according to
certain carvings the denizens of that city
had themselves known the clutch of oppressive
terror; for there was a sombre and recurrent
type of scene in which the Old Ones were shewn
in the act of recoiling affrightedly from
some object—never allowed to appear in the
design—found in the great river and indicated
as having been washed down through waving,
vine-draped cycad-forests from those horrible
westward mountains.
It was only in the one late-built house with
the decadent carvings that we obtained any
foreshadowing of the final calamity leading
to the city’s desertion. Undoubtedly there
must have been many sculptures of the same
age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened
energies and aspirations of a stressful and
uncertain period; indeed, very certain evidence
of the existence of others came to us shortly
afterward. But this was the first and only
set we directly encountered. We meant to look
farther later on; but as I have said, immediate
conditions dictated another present objective.
There would, though, have been a limit—for
after all hope of a long future occupancy
of the place had perished among the Old Ones,
there could not but have been a complete cessation
of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of
course, was the coming of the great cold which
once held most of the earth in thrall, and
which has never departed from the ill-fated
poles—the great cold that, at the world’s
other extremity, put an end to the fabled
lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.
Just when this tendency began in the antarctic
it would be hard to say in terms of exact
years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the
general glacial periods at a distance of about
500,000 years from the present, but at the
poles the terrible scourge must have commenced
much earlier. All quantitative estimates are
partly guesswork; but it is quite likely that
the decadent sculptures were made considerably
less than a million years ago, and that the
actual desertion of the city was complete
long before the conventional opening of the
Pleistocene—500,000 years ago—as reckoned
in terms of the earth’s whole surface.
In the decadent sculptures there were signs
of thinner vegetation everywhere, and of a
decreased country life on the part of the
Old Ones. Heating devices were shewn in the
houses, and winter travellers were represented
as muffled in protective fabrics. Then we
saw a series of cartouches (the continuous
band arrangement being frequently interrupted
in these late carvings) depicting a constantly
growing migration to the nearest refuges of
greater warmth—some fleeing to cities under
the sea off the far-away coast, and some clambering
down through networks of limestone caverns
in the hollow hills to the neighbouring black
abyss of subterrene waters.
In the end it seems to have been the neighbouring
abyss which received the greatest colonisation.
This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional
sacredness of this especial region; but may
have been more conclusively determined by
the opportunities it gave for continuing the
use of the great temples on the honeycombed
mountains, and for retaining the vast land
city as a place of summer residence and base
of communication with various mines. The linkage
of old and new abodes was made more effective
by means of several gradings and improvements
along the connecting routes, including the
chiselling of numerous direct tunnels from
the ancient metropolis to the black abyss—sharply
down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully
drew, according to our most thoughtful estimates,
on the guide map we were compiling. It was
obvious that at least two of these tunnels
lay within a reasonable exploring distance
of where we were; both being on the mountainward
edge of the city, one less than a quarter-mile
toward the ancient river-course, and the other
perhaps twice that distance in the opposite
direction.
The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of
dry land at certain places; but the Old Ones
built their new city under water—no doubt
because of its greater certainty of uniform
warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears
to have been very great, so that the earth’s
internal heat could ensure its habitability
for an indefinite period. The beings seem
to have had no trouble in adapting themselves
to part-time—and eventually, of course,
whole-time—residence under water; since
they had never allowed their gill systems
to atrophy. There were many sculptures which
shewed how they had always frequently visited
their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how
they had habitually bathed on the deep bottom
of their great river. The darkness of inner
earth could likewise have been no deterrent
to a race accustomed to long antarctic nights.
Decadent though their style undoubtedly was,
these latest carvings had a truly epic quality
where they told of the building of the new
city in the cavern sea. The Old Ones had gone
about it scientifically; quarrying insoluble
rocks from the heart of the honeycombed mountains,
and employing expert workers from the nearest
submarine city to perform the construction
according to the best methods. These workers
brought with them all that was necessary to
establish the new venture—shoggoth-tissue
from which to breed stone-lifters and subsequent
beasts of burden for the cavern city, and
other protoplasmic matter to mould into phosphorescent
organisms for lighting purposes.
At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom
of that Stygian sea; its architecture much
like that of the city above, and its workmanship
displaying relatively little decadence because
of the precise mathematical element inherent
in building operations. The newly bred shoggoths
grew to enormous size and singular intelligence,
and were represented as taking and executing
orders with marvellous quickness. They seemed
to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking
their voices—a sort of musical piping over
a wide range, if poor Lake’s dissection
had indicated aright—and to work more from
spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions
as in earlier times. They were, however, kept
in admirable control. The phosphorescent organisms
supplied light with vast effectiveness, and
doubtless atoned for the loss of the familiar
polar auroras of the outer-world night.
Art and decoration were pursued, though of
course with a certain decadence. The Old Ones
seemed to realise this falling off themselves;
and in many cases anticipated the policy of
Constantine the Great by transplanting especially
fine blocks of ancient carving from their
land city, just as the emperor, in a similar
age of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of
their finest art to give his new Byzantine
capital greater splendours than its own people
could create. That the transfer of sculptured
blocks had not been more extensive, was doubtless
owing to the fact that the land city was not
at first wholly abandoned. By the time total
abandonment did occur—and it surely must
have occurred before the polar Pleistocene
was far advanced—the Old Ones had perhaps
become satisfied with their decadent art—or
had ceased to recognise the superior merit
of the older carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent
ruins around us had certainly undergone no
wholesale sculptural denudation; though all
the best separate statues, like other moveables,
had been taken away.
The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling
this story were, as I have said, the latest
we could find in our limited search. They
left us with a picture of the Old Ones shuttling
back and forth betwixt the land city in summer
and the sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes
trading with the sea-bottom cities off the
antarctic coast. By this time the ultimate
doom of the land city must have been recognised,
for the sculptures shewed many signs of the
cold’s malign encroachments. Vegetation
was declining, and the terrible snows of the
winter no longer melted completely even in
midsummer. The saurian livestock were nearly
all dead, and the mammals were standing it
none too well. To keep on with the work of
the upper world it had become necessary to
adapt some of the amorphous and curiously
cold-resistant shoggoths to land life; a thing
the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant to
do. The great river was now lifeless, and
the upper sea had lost most of its denizens
except the seals and whales. All the birds
had flown away, save only the great, grotesque
penguins.
What had happened afterward we could only
guess. How long had the new sea-cavern city
survived? Was it still down there, a stony
corpse in eternal blackness? Had the subterranean
waters frozen at last? To what fate had the
ocean-bottom cities of the outer world been
delivered? Had any of the Old Ones shifted
north ahead of the creeping ice-cap? Existing
geology shews no trace of their presence.
Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace
in the outer land world of the north? Could
one be sure of what might or might not linger
even to this day in the lightless and unplumbed
abysses of earth’s deepest waters? Those
things had seemingly been able to withstand
any amount of pressure—and men of the sea
have fished up curious objects at times. And
has the killer-whale theory really explained
the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic
seals noticed a generation ago by Borchgrevingk?
The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter
into these guesses, for their geologic setting
proved them to have lived at what must have
been a very early date in the land city’s
history. They were, according to their location,
certainly not less than thirty million years
old; and we reflected that in their day the
sea-cavern city, and indeed the cavern itself,
had no existence. They would have remembered
an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation
everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing
arts around them, and a great river sweeping
northward along the base of the mighty mountains
toward a far-away tropic ocean.
And yet we could not help thinking about these
specimens—especially about the eight perfect
ones that were missing from Lake’s hideously
ravaged camp. There was something abnormal
about that whole business—the strange things
we had tried so hard to lay to somebody’s
madness—those frightful graves—the amount
and nature of the missing material—Gedney—the
unearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities,
and the queer vital freaks the sculptures
now shewed the race to have. . . . Danforth
and I had seen a good deal in the last few
hours, and were prepared to believe and keep
silent about many appalling and incredible
secrets of primal Nature.
NINE
I have said that our study of the decadent
sculptures brought about a change in our immediate
objective. This of course had to do with the
chiselled avenues to the black inner world,
of whose existence we had not known before,
but which we were now eager to find and traverse.
From the evident scale of the carvings we
deduced that a steeply descending walk of
about a mile through either of the neighbouring
tunnels would bring us to the brink of the
dizzy sunless cliffs above the great abyss;
down whose side adequate paths, improved by
the Old Ones, led to the rocky shore of the
hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this fabulous
gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed
impossible of resistance once we knew of the
thing—yet we realised we must begin the
quest at once if we expected to include it
on our present flight.
It was now 8 P.M., and we had not enough battery
replacements to let our torches burn on forever.
We had done so much of our studying and copying
below the glacial level that our battery supply
had had at least five hours of nearly continuous
use; and despite the special dry cell formula
would obviously be good for only about four
more—though by keeping one torch unused,
except for especially interesting or difficult
places, we might manage to eke out a safe
margin beyond that. It would not do to be
without a light in these Cyclopean catacombs,
hence in order to make the abyss trip we must
give up all further mural deciphering. Of
course we intended to revisit the place for
days and perhaps weeks of intensive study
and photography—curiosity having long ago
got the better of horror—but just now we
must hasten. Our supply of trail-blazing paper
was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant
to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching
paper to augment it; but we did let one large
notebook go. If worst came to worst, we could
resort to rock-chipping—and of course it
would be possible, even in case of really
lost direction, to work up to full daylight
by one channel or another if granted sufficient
time for plentiful trial and error. So at
last we set off eagerly in the indicated direction
of the nearest tunnel.
According to the carvings from which we had
made our map, the desired tunnel-mouth could
not be much more than a quarter-mile from
where we stood; the intervening space shewing
solid-looking buildings quite likely to be
penetrable still at a sub-glacial level. The
opening itself would be in the basement—on
the angle nearest the foothills—of a vast
five-pointed structure of evidently public
and perhaps ceremonial nature, which we tried
to identify from our aërial survey of the
ruins. No such structure came to our minds
as we recalled our flight, hence we concluded
that its upper parts had been greatly damaged,
or that it had been totally shattered in an
ice-rift we had noticed. In the latter case
the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked,
so that we would have to try the next nearest
one—the one less than a mile to the north.
The intervening river-course prevented our
trying any of the more southerly tunnels on
this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighbouring
ones were choked it was doubtful whether our
batteries would warrant an attempt on the
next northerly one—about a mile beyond our
second choice.
As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth
with the aid of map and compass—traversing
rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin
or preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing
upper floors and bridges and clambering down
again, encountering choked doorways and piles
of debris, hastening now and then along finely
preserved and uncannily immaculate stretches,
taking false leads and retracing our way (in
such cases removing the blind paper trail
we had left), and once in a while striking
the bottom of an open shaft through which
daylight poured or trickled down—we were
repeatedly tantalised by the sculptured walls
along our route. Many must have told tales
of immense historical importance, and only
the prospect of later visits reconciled us
to the need of passing them by. As it was,
we slowed down once in a while and turned
on our second torch. If we had had more films
we would certainly have paused briefly to
photograph certain bas-reliefs, but time-consuming
hand copying was clearly out of the question.
I come now once more to a place where the
temptation to hesitate, or to hint rather
than state, is very strong. It is necessary,
however, to reveal the rest in order to justify
my course in discouraging further exploration.
We had wormed our way very close to the computed
site of the tunnel’s mouth—having crossed
a second-story bridge to what seemed plainly
the tip of a pointed wall, and descended to
a ruinous corridor especially rich in decadently
elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures
of late workmanship—when, about 8:30 P.M.,
Danforth’s keen young nostrils gave us the
first hint of something unusual. If we had
had a dog with us, I suppose we would have
been warned before. At first we could not
precisely say what was wrong with the formerly
crystal-pure air, but after a few seconds
our memories reacted only too definitely.
Let me try to state the thing without flinching.
There was an odour—and that odour was vaguely,
subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had
nauseated us upon opening the insane grave
of the horror poor Lake had dissected.
Of course the revelation was not as clearly
cut at the time as it sounds now. There were
several conceivable explanations, and we did
a good deal of indecisive whispering. Most
important of all, we did not retreat without
further investigation; for having come this
far, we were loath to be balked by anything
short of certain disaster. Anyway, what we
must have suspected was altogether too wild
to believe. Such things did not happen in
any normal world. It was probably sheer irrational
instinct which made us dim our single torch—tempted
no longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures
that leered menacingly from the oppressive
walls—and which softened our progress to
a cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the
increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris.
Danforth’s eyes as well as nose proved better
than mine, for it was likewise he who first
noticed the queer aspect of the debris after
we had passed many half-choked arches leading
to chambers and corridors on the ground level.
It did not look quite as it ought after countless
thousands of years of desertion, and when
we cautiously turned on more light we saw
that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately
tracked through it. The irregular nature of
the litter precluded any definite marks, but
in the smoother places there were suggestions
of the dragging of heavy objects. Once we
thought there was a hint of parallel tracks,
as if of runners. This was what made us pause
again.
It was during that pause that we caught—simultaneously
this time—the other odour ahead. Paradoxically,
it was both a less frightful and a more frightful
odour—less frightful intrinsically, but
infinitely appalling in this place under the
known circumstances . . . unless, of course,
Gedney. . . . For the odour was the plain
and familiar one of common petrol—every-day
gasoline.
Our motivation after that is something I will
leave to psychologists. We knew now that some
terrible extension of the camp horrors must
have crawled into this nighted burial-place
of the aeons, hence could not doubt any longer
the existence of nameless conditions—present
or at least recent—just ahead. Yet in the
end we did let sheer burning curiosity—or
anxiety—or auto-hypnotism—or vague thoughts
of responsibility toward Gedney—or what
not—drive us on. Danforth whispered again
of the print he thought he had seen at the
alley-turning in the ruins above; and of the
faint musical piping—potentially of tremendous
significance in the light of Lake’s dissection
report despite its close resemblance to the
cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks—which
he thought he had shortly afterward half heard
from unknown depths below. I, in my turn,
whispered of how the camp was left—of what
had disappeared, and of how the madness of
a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivable—a
wild trip across the monstrous mountains and
a descent into the unknown primal masonry—
But we could not convince each other, or even
ourselves, of anything definite. We had turned
off all light as we stood still, and vaguely
noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper
day kept the blackness from being absolute.
Having automatically begun to move ahead,
we guided ourselves by occasional flashes
from our torch. The disturbed debris formed
an impression we could not shake off, and
the smell of gasoline grew stronger. More
and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our
feet, until very soon we saw that the forward
way was about to cease. We had been all too
correct in our pessimistic guess about that
rift glimpsed from the air. Our tunnel quest
was a blind one, and we were not even going
to be able to reach the basement out of which
the abyssward aperture opened.
The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carven
walls of the blocked corridor in which we
stood, shewed several doorways in various
states of obstruction; and from one of them
the gasoline odour—quite submerging that
other hint of odour—came with especial distinctness.
As we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond
a doubt there had been a slight and recent
clearing away of debris from that particular
opening. Whatever the lurking horror might
be, we believed the direct avenue toward it
was now plainly manifest. I do not think anyone
will wonder that we waited an appreciable
time before making any further motion.
And yet, when we did venture inside that black
arch, our first impression was one of anticlimax.
For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured
crypt—a perfect cube with sides of about
twenty feet—there remained no recent object
of instantly discernible size; so that we
looked instinctively, though in vain, for
a farther doorway. In another moment, however,
Danforth’s sharp vision had descried a place
where the floor debris had been disturbed;
and we turned on both torches full strength.
Though what we saw in that light was actually
simple and trifling, I am none the less reluctant
to tell of it because of what it implied.
It was a rough levelling of the debris, upon
which several small objects lay carelessly
scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable
amount of gasoline must have been spilled
lately enough to leave a strong odour even
at this extreme super-plateau altitude. In
other words, it could not be other than a
sort of camp—a camp made by questing beings
who like us had been turned back by the unexpectedly
choked way to the abyss.
Let me be plain. The scattered objects were,
so far as substance was concerned, all from
Lake’s camp; and consisted of tin cans as
queerly opened as those we had seen at that
ravaged place, many spent matches, three illustrated
books more or less curiously smudged, an empty
ink bottle with its pictorial and instructional
carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly
snipped fragments of fur and tent-cloth, a
used electric battery with circular of directions,
a folder that came with our type of tent heater,
and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was
all bad enough, but when we smoothed out the
papers and looked at what was on them we felt
we had come to the worst. We had found certain
inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which
might have prepared us, yet the effect of
the sight down there in the pre-human vaults
of a nightmare city was almost too much to
bear.
A mad Gedney might have made the groups of
dots in imitation of those found on the greenish
soapstones, just as the dots on those insane
five-pointed grave-mounds might have been
made; and he might conceivably have prepared
rough, hasty sketches—varying in their accuracy
or lack of it—which outlined the neighbouring
parts of the city and traced the way from
a circularly represented place outside our
previous route—a place we identified as
a great cylindrical tower in the carvings
and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our
aërial survey—to the present five-pointed
structure and the tunnel-mouth therein. He
might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches;
for those before us were quite obviously compiled
as our own had been from late sculptures somewhere
in the glacial labyrinth, though not from
the ones which we had seen and used. But what
this art-blind bungler could never have done
was to execute those sketches in a strange
and assured technique perhaps superior, despite
haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent
carvings from which they were taken—the
characteristic and unmistakable technique
of the Old Ones themselves in the dead city’s
heyday.
There are those who will say Danforth and
I were utterly mad not to flee for our lives
after that; since our conclusions were now—notwithstanding
their wildness—completely fixed, and of
a nature I need not even mention to those
who have read my account as far as this. Perhaps
we were mad—for have I not said those horrible
peaks were mountains of madness? But I think
I can detect something of the same spirit—albeit
in a less extreme form—in the men who stalk
deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph
them or study their habits. Half-paralysed
with terror though we were, there was nevertheless
fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and
curiosity which triumphed in the end.
Of course we did not mean to face that—or
those—which we knew had been there, but
we felt that they must be gone by now. They
would by this time have found the other neighbouring
entrance to the abyss, and have passed within
to whatever night-black fragments of the past
might await them in the ultimate gulf—the
ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that
entrance, too, was blocked, they would have
gone on to the north seeking another. They
were, we remembered, partly independent of
light.
Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely
recall just what precise form our new emotions
took—just what change of immediate objective
it was that so sharpened our sense of expectancy.
We certainly did not mean to face what we
feared—yet I will not deny that we may have
had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain
things from some hidden vantage-point. Probably
we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the
abyss itself, though there was interposed
a new goal in the form of that great circular
place shewn on the crumpled sketches we had
found. We had at once recognised it as a monstrous
cylindrical tower figuring in the very earliest
carvings, but appearing only as a prodigious
round aperture from above. Something about
the impressiveness of its rendering, even
in these hasty diagrams, made us think that
its sub-glacial levels must still form a feature
of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied
architectural marvels as yet unencountered
by us. It was certainly of incredible age
according to the sculptures in which it figured—being
indeed among the first things built in the
city. Its carvings, if preserved, could not
but be highly significant. Moreover, it might
form a good present link with the upper world—a
shorter route than the one we were so carefully
blazing, and probably that by which those
others had descended.
At any rate, the thing we did was to study
the terrible sketches—which quite perfectly
confirmed our own—and start back over the
indicated course to the circular place; the
course which our nameless predecessors must
have traversed twice before us. The other
neighbouring gate to the abyss would lie beyond
that. I need not speak of our journey—during
which we continued to leave an economical
trail of paper—for it was precisely the
same in kind as that by which we had reached
the cul de sac; except that it tended to adhere
more closely to the ground level and even
descend to basement corridors. Every now and
then we could trace certain disturbing marks
in the debris or litter under foot; and after
we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline
scent we were again faintly conscious—spasmodically—of
that more hideous and more persistent scent.
After the way had branched from our former
course we sometimes gave the rays of our single
torch a furtive sweep along the walls; noting
in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent
sculptures, which indeed seem to have formed
a main aesthetic outlet for the Old Ones.
About 9:30 P.M., while traversing a vaulted
corridor whose increasingly glaciated floor
seemed somewhat below the ground level and
whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we began
to see strong daylight ahead and were able
to turn off our torch. It appeared that we
were coming to the vast circular place, and
that our distance from the upper air could
not be very great. The corridor ended in an
arch surprisingly low for these megalithic
ruins, but we could see much through it even
before we emerged. Beyond there stretched
a prodigious round space—fully 200 feet
in diameter—strown with debris and containing
many choked archways corresponding to the
one we were about to cross. The walls were—in
available spaces—boldly sculptured into
a spiral band of heroic proportions; and displayed,
despite the destructive weathering caused
by the openness of the spot, an artistic splendour
far beyond anything we had encountered before.
The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated,
and we fancied that the true bottom lay at
a considerably lower depth.
But the salient object of the place was the
titanic stone ramp which, eluding the archways
by a sharp turn outward into the open floor,
wound spirally up the stupendous cylindrical
wall like an inside counterpart of those once
climbing outside the monstrous towers or ziggurats
of antique Babylon. Only the rapidity of our
flight, and the perspective which confounded
the descent with the tower’s inner wall,
had prevented our noticing this feature from
the air, and thus caused us to seek another
avenue to the sub-glacial level. Pabodie might
have been able to tell what sort of engineering
held it in place, but Danforth and I could
merely admire and marvel. We could see mighty
stone corbels and pillars here and there,
but what we saw seemed inadequate to the function
performed. The thing was excellently preserved
up to the present top of the tower—a highly
remarkable circumstance in view of its exposure—and
its shelter had done much to protect the bizarre
and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.
As we stepped out into the awesome half-daylight
of this monstrous cylinder-bottom—fifty
million years old, and without doubt the most
primally ancient structure ever to meet our
eyes—we saw that the ramp-traversed sides
stretched dizzily up to a height of fully
sixty feet. This, we recalled from our aërial
survey, meant an outside glaciation of some
forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had
seen from the plane had been at the top of
an approximately twenty-foot mound of crumbled
masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths
of its circumference by the massive curving
walls of a line of higher ruins. According
to the sculptures the original tower had stood
in the centre of an immense circular plaza;
and had been perhaps 500 or 600 feet high,
with tiers of horizontal discs near the top,
and a row of needle-like spires along the
upper rim. Most of the masonry had obviously
toppled outward rather than inward—a fortunate
happening, since otherwise the ramp might
have been shattered and the whole interior
choked. As it was, the ramp shewed sad battering;
whilst the choking was such that all the archways
at the bottom seemed to have been recently
half-cleared.
It took us only a moment to conclude that
this was indeed the route by which those others
had descended, and that this would be the
logical route for our own ascent despite the
long trail of paper we had left elsewhere.
The tower’s mouth was no farther from the
foothills and our waiting plane than was the
great terraced building we had entered, and
any further sub-glacial exploration we might
make on this trip would lie in this general
region. Oddly, we were still thinking about
possible later trips—even after all we had
seen and guessed. Then as we picked our way
cautiously over the debris of the great floor,
there came a sight which for the time excluded
all other matters.
It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges
in that farther angle of the ramp’s lower
and outward-projecting course which had hitherto
been screened from our view. There they were—the
three sledges missing from Lake’s camp—shaken
by a hard usage which must have included forcible
dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry
and debris, as well as much hand portage over
utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully
and intelligently packed and strapped, and
contained things memorably familiar enough—the
gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases,
provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging
with books, and some bulging with less obvious
contents—everything derived from Lake’s
equipment. After what we had found in that
other room, we were in a measure prepared
for this encounter. The really great shock
came when we stepped over and undid one tarpaulin
whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us.
It seems that others as well as Lake had been
interested in collecting typical specimens;
for there were two here, both stiffly frozen,
perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive
plaster where some wounds around the neck
had occurred, and wrapped with patent care
to prevent further damage. They were the bodies
of young Gedney and the missing dog.
TEN
Many people will probably judge us callous
as well as mad for thinking about the northward
tunnel and the abyss so soon after our sombre
discovery, and I am not prepared to say that
we would have immediately revived such thoughts
but for a specific circumstance which broke
in upon us and set up a whole new train of
speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin
over poor Gedney and were standing in a kind
of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally
reached our consciousness—the first sounds
we had heard since descending out of the open
where the mountain wind whined faintly from
its unearthly heights. Well known and mundane
though they were, their presence in this remote
world of death was more unexpected and unnerving
than any grotesque or fabulous tones could
possibly have been—since they gave a fresh
upsetting to all our notions of cosmic harmony.
Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical
piping over a wide range which Lake’s dissection
report had led us to expect in those others—and
which, indeed, our overwrought fancies had
been reading into every wind-howl we had heard
since coming on the camp horror—it would
have had a kind of hellish congruity with
the aeon-dead region around us. A voice from
other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other
epochs. As it was, however, the noise shattered
all our profoundly seated adjustments—all
our tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic
as a waste as utterly and irrevocably void
of every vestige of normal life as the sterile
disc of the moon. What we heard was not the
fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder
earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied
polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.
Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal
and so unerringly familiarised by our sea
days off Victoria Land and our camp days at
McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of
it here, where such things ought not to be.
To be brief—it was simply the raucous squawking
of a penguin.
The muffled sound floated from sub-glacial
recesses nearly opposite to the corridor whence
we had come—regions manifestly in the direction
of that other tunnel to the vast abyss. The
presence of a living water-bird in such a
direction—in a world whose surface was one
of age-long and uniform lifelessness—could
lead to only one conclusion; hence our first
thought was to verify the objective reality
of the sound. It was, indeed, repeated; and
seemed at times to come from more than one
throat. Seeking its source, we entered an
archway from which much debris had been cleared;
resuming our trail-blazing—with an added
paper-supply taken with curious repugnance
from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledges—when
we left daylight behind.
As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter
of detritus, we plainly discerned some curious
dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a
distinct print of a sort whose description
would be only too superfluous. The course
indicated by the penguin cries was precisely
what our map and compass prescribed as an
approach to the more northerly tunnel-mouth,
and we were glad to find that a bridgeless
thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels
seemed open. The tunnel, according to the
chart, ought to start from the basement of
a large pyramidal structure which we seemed
vaguely to recall from our aërial survey
as remarkably well preserved. Along our path
the single torch shewed a customary profusion
of carvings, but we did not pause to examine
any of these.
Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead
of us, and we flashed on the second torch.
It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned
our minds from earlier fears of what might
lurk near. Those other ones, having left their
supplies in the great circular place, must
have planned to return after their scouting
trip toward or into the abyss; yet we had
now discarded all caution concerning them
as completely as if they had never existed.
This white, waddling thing was fully six feet
high, yet we seemed to realise at once that
it was not one of those others. They were
larger and dark, and according to the sculptures
their motion over land surfaces was a swift,
assured matter despite the queerness of their
sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that
the white thing did not profoundly frighten
us would be vain. We were indeed clutched
for an instant by a primitive dread almost
sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears
regarding those others. Then came a flash
of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into
a lateral archway to our left to join two
others of its kind which had summoned it in
raucous tones. For it was only a penguin—albeit
of a huge, unknown species larger than the
greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous
in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.
When we had followed the thing into the archway
and turned both our torches on the indifferent
and unheeding group of three we saw that they
were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown
and gigantic species. Their size reminded
us of some of the archaic penguins depicted
in the Old Ones’ sculptures, and it did
not take us long to conclude that they were
descended from the same stock—undoubtedly
surviving through a retreat to some warmer
inner region whose perpetual blackness had
destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied
their eyes to mere useless slits. That their
present habitat was the vast abyss we sought,
was not for a moment to be doubted; and this
evidence of the gulf’s continued warmth
and habitability filled us with the most curious
and subtly perturbing fancies.
We wondered, too, what had caused these three
birds to venture out of their usual domain.
The state and silence of the great dead city
made it clear that it had at no time been
an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest
indifference of the trio to our presence made
it seem odd that any passing party of those
others should have startled them. Was it possible
that those others had taken some aggressive
action or tried to increase their meat supply?
We doubted whether that pungent odour which
the dogs had hated could cause an equal antipathy
in these penguins; since their ancestors had
obviously lived on excellent terms with the
Old Ones—an amicable relationship which
must have survived in the abyss below as long
as any of the Old Ones remained. Regretting—in
a flareup of the old spirit of pure science—that
we could not photograph these anomalous creatures,
we shortly left them to their squawking and
pushed on toward the abyss whose openness
was now so positively proved to us, and whose
exact direction occasional penguin tracks
made clear.
Not long afterward a steep descent in a long,
low, doorless, and peculiarly sculptureless
corridor led us to believe that we were approaching
the tunnel-mouth at last. We had passed two
more penguins, and heard others immediately
ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious
open space which made us gasp involuntarily—a
perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep
underground; fully an hundred feet in diameter
and fifty feet high, with low archways opening
around all parts of the circumference but
one, and that one yawning cavernously with
a black arched aperture which broke the symmetry
of the vault to a height of nearly fifteen
feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss.
In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof
was impressively though decadently carved
to a likeness of the primordial celestial
dome, a few albino penguins waddled—aliens
there, but indifferent and unseeing. The black
tunnel yawned indefinitely off at a steep
descending grade, its aperture adorned with
grotesquely chiselled jambs and lintel. From
that cryptical mouth we fancied a current
of slightly warmer air and perhaps even a
suspicion of vapour proceeded; and we wondered
what living entities other than penguins the
limitless void below, and the contiguous honeycombings
of the land and the titan mountains, might
conceal. We wondered, too, whether the trace
of mountain-top smoke at first suspected by
poor Lake, as well as the odd haze we had
ourselves perceived around the rampart-crowned
peak, might not be caused by the tortuous-channelled
rising of some such vapour from the unfathomed
regions of earth’s core.
Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline
was—at least at the start—about fifteen
feet each way; sides, floor, and arched roof
composed of the usual megalithic masonry.
The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches
of conventional designs in a late, decadent
style; and all the construction and carving
were marvellously well preserved. The floor
was quite clear, except for a slight detritus
bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward
tracks of those others. The farther one advanced,
the warmer it became; so that we were soon
unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered
whether there were any actually igneous manifestations
below, and whether the waters of that sunless
sea were hot. After a short distance the masonry
gave place to solid rock, though the tunnel
kept the same proportions and presented the
same aspect of carved regularity. Occasionally
its varying grade became so steep that grooves
were cut in the floor. Several times we noted
the mouths of small lateral galleries not
recorded in our diagrams; none of them such
as to complicate the problem of our return,
and all of them welcome as possible refuges
in case we met unwelcome entities on their
way back from the abyss. The nameless scent
of such things was very distinct. Doubtless
it was suicidally foolish to venture into
that tunnel under the known conditions, but
the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain
persons than most suspect—indeed, it was
just such a lure which had brought us to this
unearthly polar waste in the first place.
We saw several penguins as we passed along,
and speculated on the distance we would have
to traverse. The carvings had led us to expect
a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the
abyss, but our previous wanderings had shewn
us that matters of scale were not wholly to
be depended on.
After about a quarter of a mile that nameless
scent became greatly accentuated, and we kept
very careful track of the various lateral
openings we passed. There was no visible vapour
as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due
to the lack of contrasting cooler air. The
temperature was rapidly ascending, and we
were not surprised to come upon a careless
heap of material shudderingly familiar to
us. It was composed of furs and tent-cloth
taken from Lake’s camp, and we did not pause
to study the bizarre forms into which the
fabrics had been slashed. Slightly beyond
this point we noticed a decided increase in
the size and number of the side-galleries,
and concluded that the densely honeycombed
region beneath the higher foothills must now
have been reached. The nameless scent was
now curiously mixed with another and scarcely
less offensive odour—of what nature we could
not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms
and perhaps unknown subterrene fungi. Then
came a startling expansion of the tunnel for
which the carvings had not prepared us—a
broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-looking
elliptical cavern with a level floor; some
75 feet long and 50 broad, and with many immense
side-passages leading away into cryptical
darkness.
Though this cavern was natural in appearance,
an inspection with both torches suggested
that it had been formed by the artificial
destruction of several walls between adjacent
honeycombings. The walls were rough, and the
high vaulted roof was thick with stalactites;
but the solid rock floor had been smoothed
off, and was free from all debris, detritus,
or even dust to a positively abnormal extent.
Except for the avenue through which we had
come, this was true of the floors of all the
great galleries opening off from it; and the
singularity of the condition was such as to
set us vainly puzzling. The curious new foetor
which had supplemented the nameless scent
was excessively pungent here; so much so that
it destroyed all trace of the other. Something
about this whole place, with its polished
and almost glistening floor, struck us as
more vaguely baffling and horrible than any
of the monstrous things we had previously
encountered.
The regularity of the passage immediately
ahead, as well as the larger proportion of
penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion
as to the right course amidst this plethora
of equally great cave-mouths. Nevertheless
we resolved to resume our paper trail-blazing
if any further complexity should develop;
for dust tracks, of course, could no longer
be expected. Upon resuming our direct progress
we cast a beam of torchlight over the tunnel
walls—and stopped short in amazement at
the supremely radical change which had come
over the carvings in this part of the passage.
We realised, of course, the great decadence
of the Old Ones’ sculpture at the time of
the tunnelling; and had indeed noticed the
inferior workmanship of the arabesques in
the stretches behind us. But now, in this
deeper section beyond the cavern, there was
a sudden difference wholly transcending explanation—a
difference in basic nature as well as in mere
quality, and involving so profound and calamitous
a degradation of skill that nothing in the
hitherto observed rate of decline could have
led one to expect it.
This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold,
and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail.
It was counter-sunk with exaggerated depth
in bands following the same general line as
the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections,
but the height of the reliefs did not reach
the level of the general surface. Danforth
had the idea that it was a second carving—a
sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration
of a previous design. In nature it was wholly
decorative and conventional; and consisted
of crude spirals and angles roughly following
the quintile mathematical tradition of the
Old Ones, yet seeming more like a parody than
a perpetuation of that tradition. We could
not get it out of our minds that some subtly
but profoundly alien element had been added
to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique—an
alien element, Danforth guessed, that was
responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution.
It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what
we had come to recognise as the Old Ones’
art; and I was persistently reminded of such
hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures
fashioned in the Roman manner. That others
had recently noticed this belt of carving
was hinted by the presence of a used torch
battery on the floor in front of one of the
most characteristic designs.
Since we could not afford to spend any considerable
time in study, we resumed our advance after
a cursory look; though frequently casting
beams over the walls to see if any further
decorative changes developed. Nothing of the
sort was perceived, though the carvings were
in places rather sparse because of the numerous
mouths of smooth-floored lateral tunnels.
We saw and heard fewer penguins, but thought
we caught a vague suspicion of an infinitely
distant chorus of them somewhere deep within
the earth. The new and inexplicable odour
was abominably strong, and we could detect
scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent.
Puffs of visible vapour ahead bespoke increasing
contrasts in temperature, and the relative
nearness of the sunless sea-cliffs of the
great abyss. Then, quite unexpectedly, we
saw certain obstructions on the polished floor
ahead—obstructions which were quite definitely
not penguins—and turned on our second torch
after making sure that the objects were quite
stationary.
ELEVEN
Still another time have I come to a place
where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought
to be hardened by this stage; but there are
some experiences and intimations which scar
too deeply to permit of healing, and leave
only such an added sensitiveness that memory
reinspires all the original horror. We saw,
as I have said, certain obstructions on the
polished floor ahead; and I may add that our
nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously
by a very curious intensification of the strange
prevailing foetor, now quite plainly mixed
with the nameless stench of those others which
had gone before us. The light of the second
torch left no doubt of what the obstructions
were, and we dared approach them only because
we could see, even from a distance, that they
were quite as past all harming power as had
been the six similar specimens unearthed from
the monstrous star-mounded graves at poor
Lake’s camp.
They were, indeed, as lacking in completeness
as most of those we had unearthed—though
it grew plain from the thick, dark-green pool
gathering around them that their incompleteness
was of infinitely greater recency. There seemed
to be only four of them, whereas Lake’s
bulletins would have suggested no less than
eight as forming the group which had preceded
us. To find them in this state was wholly
unexpected, and we wondered what sort of monstrous
struggle had occurred down here in the dark.
Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely
with their beaks; and our ears now made certain
the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had
those others disturbed such a place and aroused
murderous pursuit? The obstructions did not
suggest it, for penguin beaks against the
tough tissues Lake had dissected could hardly
account for the terrible damage our approaching
glance was beginning to make out. Besides,
the huge blind birds we had seen appeared
to be singularly peaceful.
Had there, then, been a struggle among those
others, and were the absent four responsible?
If so, where were they? Were they close at
hand and likely to form an immediate menace
to us? We glanced anxiously at some of the
smooth-floored lateral passages as we continued
our slow and frankly reluctant approach. Whatever
the conflict was, it had clearly been that
which had frightened the penguins into their
unaccustomed wandering. It must, then, have
arisen near that faintly heard rookery in
the incalculable gulf beyond, since there
were no signs that any birds had normally
dwelt here. Perhaps, we reflected, there had
been a hideous running fight, with the weaker
party seeking to get back to the cached sledges
when their pursuers finished them. One could
picture the daemoniac fray between namelessly
monstrous entities as it surged out of the
black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins
squawking and scurrying ahead.
I say that we approached those sprawling and
incomplete obstructions slowly and reluctantly.
Would to heaven we had never approached them
at all, but had run back at top speed out
of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily
smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping
and mocking the things they had superseded—run
back, before we had seen what we did see,
and before our minds were burned with something
which will never let us breathe easily again!
Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate
objects, so that we soon realised the dominant
factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed,
twisted, and ruptured as they were, their
chief common injury was total decapitation.
From each one the tentacled starfish-head
had been removed; and as we drew near we saw
that the manner of removal looked more like
some hellish tearing or suction than like
any ordinary form of cleavage. Their noisome
dark-green ichor formed a large, spreading
pool; but its stench was half overshadowed
by that newer and stranger stench, here more
pungent than at any other point along our
route. Only when we had come very close to
the sprawling obstructions could we trace
that second, unexplainable foetor to any immediate
source—and the instant we did so Danforth,
remembering certain very vivid sculptures
of the Old Ones’ history in the Permian
age 150 million years ago, gave vent to a
nerve-tortured cry which echoed hysterically
through that vaulted and archaic passage with
the evil palimpsest carvings.
I came only just short of echoing his cry
myself; for I had seen those primal sculptures,
too, and had shudderingly admired the way
the nameless artist had suggested that hideous
slime-coating found on certain incomplete
and prostrate Old Ones—those whom the frightful
shoggoths had characteristically slain and
sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great
war of re-subjugation. They were infamous,
nightmare sculptures even when telling of
age-old, bygone things; for shoggoths and
their work ought not to be seen by human beings
or portrayed by any beings. The mad author
of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to
swear that none had been bred on this planet,
and that only drugged dreamers had ever conceived
them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and
reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous
agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery
fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic
and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders
of cities—more and more sullen, more and
more intelligent, more and more amphibious,
more and more imitative—Great God! What
madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones
willing to use and to carve such things?
And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly
glistening and reflectively iridescent black
slime which clung thickly to those headless
bodies and stank obscenely with that new unknown
odour whose cause only a diseased fancy could
envisage—clung to those bodies and sparkled
less voluminously on a smooth part of the
accursedly re-sculptured wall in a series
of grouped dots—we understood the quality
of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It
was not fear of those four missing others—for
all too well did we suspect they would do
no harm again. Poor devils! After all, they
were not evil things of their kind. They were
the men of another age and another order of
being. Nature had played a hellish jest on
them—as it will on any others that human
madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter
drag up in that hideously dead or sleeping
polar waste—and this was their tragic homecoming.
They had not been even savages—for what
indeed had they done? That awful awakening
in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps
an attack by the furry, frantically barking
quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them
and the equally frantic white simians with
the queer wrappings and paraphernalia . . . poor
Lake, poor Gedney . . . and poor Old Ones!
Scientists to the last—what had they done
that we would not have done in their place?
God, what intelligence and persistence! What
a facing of the incredible, just as those
carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things
only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables,
monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they
had been, they were men!
They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed
slopes they had once worshipped and roamed
among the tree-ferns. They had found their
dead city brooding under its curse, and had
read its carven latter days as we had done.
They had tried to reach their living fellows
in fabled depths of blackness they had never
seen—and what had they found? All this flashed
in unison through the thoughts of Danforth
and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated
shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures
and the diabolical dot-groups of fresh slime
on the wall beside them—looked and understood
what must have triumphed and survived down
there in the Cyclopean water-city of that
nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even
now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch
pallidly as if in answer to Danforth’s hysterical
scream.
The shock of recognising that monstrous slime
and headlessness had frozen us into mute,
motionless statues, and it is only through
later conversations that we have learned of
the complete identity of our thoughts at that
moment. It seemed aeons that we stood there,
but actually it could not have been more than
ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid
mist curled forward as if veritably driven
by some remoter advancing bulk—and then
came a sound which upset much of what we had
just decided, and in so doing broke the spell
and enabled us to run like mad past squawking,
confused penguins over our former trail back
to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors
to the great open circle, and up that archaic
spiral ramp in a frenzied automatic plunge
for the sane outer air and light of day.
The new sound, as I have intimated, upset
much that we had decided; because it was what
poor Lake’s dissection had led us to attribute
to those we had just judged dead. It was,
Danforth later told me, precisely what he
had caught in infinitely muffled form when
at that spot beyond the alley-corner above
the glacial level; and it certainly had a
shocking resemblance to the wind-pipings we
had both heard around the lofty mountain caves.
At the risk of seeming puerile I will add
another thing, too; if only because of the
surprising way Danforth’s impression chimed
with mine. Of course common reading is what
prepared us both to make the interpretation,
though Danforth has hinted at queer notions
about unsuspected and forbidden sources to
which Poe may have had access when writing
his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will
be remembered that in that fantastic tale
there is a word of unknown but terrible and
prodigious significance connected with the
antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic,
spectrally snowy birds of that malign region’s
core. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” That, I
may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard
conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing
white mist—that insidious musical piping
over a singularly wide range.
We were in full flight before three notes
or syllables had been uttered, though we knew
that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable
any scream-roused and pursuing survivor of
the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if
it really wished to do so. We had a vague
hope, however, that non-aggressive conduct
and a display of kindred reason might cause
such a being to spare us in case of capture;
if only from scientific curiosity. After all,
if such an one had nothing to fear for itself
it would have no motive in harming us. Concealment
being futile at this juncture, we used our
torch for a running glance behind, and perceived
that the mist was thinning. Would we see,
at last, a complete and living specimen of
those others? Again came that insidious musical
piping—“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
Then, noting that we were actually gaining
on our pursuer, it occurred to us that the
entity might be wounded. We could take no
chances, however, since it was very obviously
approaching in answer to Danforth’s scream
rather than in flight from any other entity.
The timing was too close to admit of doubt.
Of the whereabouts of that less conceivable
and less mentionable nightmare—that foetid,
unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm
whose race had conquered the abyss and sent
land pioneers to re-carve and squirm through
the burrows of the hills—we could form no
guess; and it cost us a genuine pang to leave
this probably crippled Old One—perhaps a
lone survivor—to the peril of recapture
and a nameless fate.
Thank heaven we did not slacken our run. The
curling mist had thickened again, and was
driving ahead with increased speed; whilst
the straying penguins in our rear were squawking
and screaming and displaying signs of a panic
really surprising in view of their relatively
minor confusion when we had passed them. Once
more came that sinister, wide-ranged piping—“Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!” We had been wrong. The thing
was not wounded, but had merely paused on
encountering the bodies of its fallen kindred
and the hellish slime inscription above them.
We could never know what that daemon message
was—but those burials at Lake’s camp had
shewn how much importance the beings attached
to their dead. Our recklessly used torch now
revealed ahead of us the large open cavern
where various ways converged, and we were
glad to be leaving those morbid palimpsest
sculptures—almost felt even when scarcely
seen—behind.
Another thought which the advent of the cave
inspired was the possibility of losing our
pursuer at this bewildering focus of large
galleries. There were several of the blind
albino penguins in the open space, and it
seemed clear that their fear of the oncoming
entity was extreme to the point of unaccountability.
If at that point we dimmed our torch to the
very lowest limit of travelling need, keeping
it strictly in front of us, the frightened
squawking motions of the huge birds in the
mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our
true course, and somehow set up a false lead.
Amidst the churning, spiralling fog the littered
and unglistening floor of the main tunnel
beyond this point, as differing from the other
morbidly polished burrows, could hardly form
a highly distinguishing feature; even, so
far as we could conjecture, for those indicated
special senses which made the Old Ones partly
though imperfectly independent of light in
emergencies. In fact, we were somewhat apprehensive
lest we go astray ourselves in our haste.
For we had, of course, decided to keep straight
on toward the dead city; since the consequences
of loss in those unknown foothill honeycombings
would be unthinkable.
The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient
proof that the thing did take a wrong gallery
whilst we providentially hit on the right
one. The penguins alone could not have saved
us, but in conjunction with the mist they
seem to have done so. Only a benign fate kept
the curling vapours thick enough at the right
moment, for they were constantly shifting
and threatening to vanish. Indeed, they did
lift for a second just before we emerged from
the nauseously re-sculptured tunnel into the
cave; so that we actually caught one first
and only half-glimpse of the oncoming entity
as we cast a final, desperately fearful glance
backward before dimming the torch and mixing
with the penguins in the hope of dodging pursuit.
If the fate which screened us was benign,
that which gave us the half-glimpse was infinitely
the opposite; for to that flash of semi-vision
can be traced a full half of the horror which
has ever since haunted us.
Our exact motive in looking back again was
perhaps no more than the immemorial instinct
of the pursued to gauge the nature and course
of its pursuer; or perhaps it was an automatic
attempt to answer a subconscious question
raised by one of our senses. In the midst
of our flight, with all our faculties centred
on the problem of escape, we were in no condition
to observe and analyse details; yet even so
our latent brain-cells must have wondered
at the message brought them by our nostrils.
Afterward we realised what it was—that our
retreat from the foetid slime-coating on those
headless obstructions, and the coincident
approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought
us the exchange of stenches which logic called
for. In the neighbourhood of the prostrate
things that new and lately unexplainable foetor
had been wholly dominant; but by this time
it ought to have largely given place to the
nameless stench associated with those others.
This it had not done—for instead, the newer
and less bearable smell was now virtually
undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously
insistent each second.
So we glanced back—simultaneously, it would
appear; though no doubt the incipient motion
of one prompted the imitation of the other.
As we did so we flashed both torches full
strength at the momentarily thinned mist;
either from sheer primitive anxiety to see
all we could, or in a less primitive but equally
unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before
we dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins
of the labyrinth-centre ahead. Unhappy act!
Not Orpheus himself, or Lot’s wife, paid
much more dearly for a backward glance. And
again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping—“Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!”
I might as well be frank—even if I cannot
bear to be quite direct—in stating what
we saw; though at the time we felt that it
was not to be admitted even to each other.
The words reaching the reader can never even
suggest the awfulness of the sight itself.
It crippled our consciousness so completely
that I wonder we had the residual sense to
dim our torches as planned, and to strike
the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct
alone must have carried us through—perhaps
better than reason could have done; though
if that was what saved us, we paid a high
price. Of reason we certainly had little enough
left. Danforth was totally unstrung, and the
first thing I remember of the rest of the
journey was hearing him light-headedly chant
an hysterical formula in which I alone of
mankind could have found anything but insane
irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes
among the squawks of the penguins; reverberated
through the vaultings ahead, and—thank God—through
the now empty vaultings behind. He could not
have begun it at once—else we would not
have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder
to think of what a shade of difference in
his nervous reactions might have brought.
“South Station Under—Washington Under—Park
Street Under—Kendall—Central—Harvard.
. . .” The 
poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations
of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed
through our peaceful native soil thousands
of miles away in New England, yet to me the
ritual had neither irrelevance nor home-feeling.
It had only horror, because I knew unerringly
the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had
suggested it. We had expected, upon looking
back, to see a terrible and incredibly moving
entity if the mists were thin enough; but
of that entity we had formed a clear idea.
What we did see—for the mists were indeed
all too malignly thinned—was something altogether
different, and immeasurably more hideous and
detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment
of the fantastic novelist’s ‘thing that
should not be’; and its nearest comprehensible
analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train
as one sees it from a station platform—the
great black front looming colossally out of
infinite subterraneous distance, constellated
with strangely coloured lights and filling
the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a
cylinder.
But we were not on a station platform. We
were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic
column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly
onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering
unholy speed and driving before it a spiral,
re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour.
It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster
than any subway train—a shapeless congeries
of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous,
and with myriads of temporary eyes forming
and unforming as pustules of greenish light
all over the tunnel-filling front that bore
down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins
and slithering over the glistening floor that
it and its kind had swept so evilly free of
all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking
cry—“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” And at last
we remembered that the daemoniac shoggoths—given
life, thought, and plastic organ patterns
solely by the Old Ones, and having no language
save that which the dot-groups expressed—had
likewise no voice save the imitated accents
of their bygone masters.
TWELVE
Danforth and I have recollections of emerging
into the great sculptured hemisphere and of
threading our back trail through the Cyclopean
rooms and corridors of the dead city; yet
these are purely dream-fragments involving
no memory of volition, details, or physical
exertion. It was as if we floated in a nebulous
world or dimension without time, causation,
or orientation. The grey half-daylight of
the vast circular space sobered us somewhat;
but we did not go near those cached sledges
or look again at poor Gedney and the dog.
They have a strange and titanic mausoleum,
and I hope the end of this planet will find
them still undisturbed.
It was while struggling up the colossal spiral
incline that we first felt the terrible fatigue
and short breath which our race through the
thin plateau air had produced; but not even
the fear of collapse could make us pause before
reaching the normal outer realm of sun and
sky. There was something vaguely appropriate
about our departure from those buried epochs;
for as we wound our panting way up the sixty-foot
cylinder of primal masonry we glimpsed beside
us a continuous procession of heroic sculptures
in the dead race’s early and undecayed technique—a
farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty
million years ago.
Finally scrambling out at the top, we found
ourselves on a great mound of tumbled blocks;
with the curved walls of higher stonework
rising westward, and the brooding peaks of
the great mountains shewing beyond the more
crumbled structures toward the east. The low
antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from
the southern horizon through rifts in the
jagged ruins, and the terrible age and deadness
of the nightmare city seemed all the starker
by contrast with such relatively known and
accustomed things as the features of the polar
landscape. The sky above was a churning and
opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapours, and
the cold clutched at our vitals. Wearily resting
the outfit-bags to which we had instinctively
clung throughout our desperate flight, we
rebuttoned our heavy garments for the stumbling
climb down the mound and the walk through
the aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where
our aëroplane waited. Of what had set us
fleeing from the darkness of earth’s secret
and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all.
In less than a quarter of an hour we had found
the steep grade to the foothills—the probable
ancient terrace—by which we had descended,
and could see the dark bulk of our great plane
amidst the sparse ruins on the rising slope
ahead. Half way uphill toward our goal we
paused for a momentary breathing-spell, and
turned to look again at the fantastic palaeogean
tangle of incredible stone shapes below us—once
more outlined mystically against an unknown
west. As we did so we saw that the sky beyond
had lost its morning haziness; the restless
ice-vapours having moved up to the zenith,
where their mocking outlines seemed on the
point of settling into some bizarre pattern
which they feared to make quite definite or
conclusive.
There now lay revealed on the ultimate white
horizon behind the grotesque city a dim, elfin
line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed
heights loomed dream-like against the beckoning
rose-colour of the western sky. Up toward
this shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land,
the depressed course of the bygone river traversing
it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a
second we gasped in admiration of the scene’s
unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror
began to creep into our souls. For this far
violet line could be nothing else than the
terrible mountains of the forbidden land—highest
of earth’s peaks and focus of earth’s
evil; harbourers of nameless horrors and Archaean
secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who
feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by
any living thing of earth, but visited by
the sinister lightnings and sending strange
beams across the plains in the polar night—beyond
doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded
Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent
Leng, whereof unholy primal legends hint evasively.
We were the first human beings ever to see
them—and I hope to God we may be the last.
If the sculptured maps and pictures in that
pre-human city had told truly, these cryptic
violet mountains could not be much less than
300 miles away; yet none the less sharply
did their dim elfin essence jut above that
remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge
of a monstrous alien planet about to rise
into unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then,
must have been tremendous beyond all known
comparison—carrying them up into tenuous
atmospheric strata peopled by such gaseous
wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to
whisper of after unexplainable falls. Looking
at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured
hints of what the great bygone river had washed
down into the city from their accursed slopes—and
wondered how much sense and how much folly
had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who
carved them so reticently. I recalled how
their northerly end must come near the coast
at Queen Mary Land, where even at that moment
Sir Douglas Mawson’s expedition was doubtless
working less than a thousand miles away; and
hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas
and his men a glimpse of what might lie beyond
the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts
formed a measure of my overwrought condition
at the time—and Danforth seemed to be even
worse.
Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped
ruin and reached our plane our fears had become
transferred to the lesser but vast enough
range whose re-crossing lay ahead of us. From
these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes
reared up starkly and hideously against the
east, again reminding us of those strange
Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when
we thought of the damnable honeycombs inside
them, and of the frightful amorphous entities
that might have pushed their foetidly squirming
way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles,
we could not face without panic the prospect
of again sailing by those suggestive skyward
cave-mouths where the wind made sounds like
an evil musical piping over a wide range.
To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces
of local mist around several of the summits—as
poor Lake must have done when he made that
early mistake about volcanism—and thought
shiveringly of that kindred mist from which
we had just escaped; of that, and of the blasphemous,
horror-fostering abyss whence all such vapours
came.
All was well with the plane, and we clumsily
hauled on our heavy flying furs. Danforth
got the engine started without trouble, and
we made a very smooth takeoff over the nightmare
city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry
spread out as it had done when first we saw
it—so short, yet infinitely long, a time
ago—and we began rising and turning to test
the wind for our crossing through the pass.
At a very high level there must have been
great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds
of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic
things; but at 24,000 feet, the height we
needed for the pass, we found navigation quite
practicable. As we drew close to the jutting
peaks the wind’s strange piping again became
manifest, and I could see Danforth’s hands
trembling at the controls. Rank amateur though
I was, I thought at that moment that I might
be a better navigator than he in effecting
the dangerous crossing between pinnacles;
and when I made motions to change seats and
take over his duties he did not protest. I
tried to keep all my skill and self-possession
about me, and stared at the sector of reddish
farther sky betwixt the walls of the pass—resolutely
refusing to pay attention to the puffs of
mountain-top vapour, and wishing that I had
wax-stopped ears like Ulysses’ men off the
Sirens’ coast to keep that disturbing wind-piping
from my consciousness.
But Danforth, released from his piloting and
keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could
not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling
about as he looked back at the terrible receding
city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled
peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy,
rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the
seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was
then, just as I was trying to steer safely
through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought
us so close to disaster by shattering my tight
hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly
with the controls for a moment. A second afterward
my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing
safely—yet I am afraid that Danforth will
never be the same again.
I have said that Danforth refused to tell
me what final horror made him scream out so
insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure,
is mainly responsible for his present breakdown.
We had snatches of shouted conversation above
the wind’s piping and the engine’s buzzing
as we reached the safe side of the range and
swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that
had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy
we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare
city. Certain things, we had agreed, were
not for people to know and discuss lightly—and
I would not speak of them now but for the
need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore
Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is
absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety
of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead
corners and unplumbed depths be let alone;
lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent
life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares
squirm and splash out of their black lairs
to newer and wider conquests.
All that Danforth has ever hinted is that
the final horror was a mirage. It was not,
he declares, anything connected with the cubes
and caves of echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed
mountains of madness which we crossed; but
a single fantastic, daemoniac glimpse, among
the churning zenith-clouds, of what lay back
of those other violet westward mountains which
the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is
very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion
born of the previous stresses we had passed
through, and of the actual though unrecognised
mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced
near Lake’s camp the day before; but it
was so real to Danforth that he suffers from
it still.
He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed
and irresponsible things about “the black
pit”, “the carven rim”, “the proto-shoggoths”,
“the windowless solids with five dimensions”,
“the nameless cylinder”, “the elder
pharos”, “Yog-Sothoth”, “the primal
white jelly”, “the colour out of space”,
“the wings”, “the eyes in darkness”,
“the moon-ladder”, “the original, the
eternal, the undying”, and other bizarre
conceptions; but when he is fully himself
he repudiates all this and attributes it to
his curious and macabre reading of earlier
years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among
the few who have ever dared go completely
through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon
kept under lock and key in the college library.
The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was
surely vaporous and disturbed enough; and
although I did not see the zenith I can well
imagine that its swirls of ice-dust may have
taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing
how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be
reflected, refracted, and magnified by such
layers of restless cloud, might easily have
supplied the rest—and of course Danforth
did not hint any of those specific horrors
till after his memory had had a chance to
draw on his bygone reading. He could never
have seen so much in one instantaneous glance.
At the time his shrieks were confined to the
repetition of a single mad word of all too
obvious source:
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
