object:1f.lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
I.
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.
II.
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.
III.
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.
IV.
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.
V.
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.
VI.
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.
VII.
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.
VIII.
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.
IX.
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.
X.
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.
XI.
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.
XII.
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!”
Return to At the Mountains of Madness
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