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Title: At the mountains of madness
Author: Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "At the mountains of madness" ***
MADNESS ***
At the MOUNTAINS of MADNESS
By H. P. LOVECRAFT
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Stories February, March, April 1936.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
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 caps. 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 favor, 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 and
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 over-ambitious program 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 natures 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 Professor 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 one thousand feet deep all
formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog
sledges could carry. This was 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 survivors, 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 more 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 by 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 myself,
representing geology and having nominal command, also 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 exwhalers, 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 marvelously 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 Harbor on September 2nd,
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--tablelike
objects with vertical sides--and just before reaching the antarctic
circle, which we crossed on October 20th 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 rigors to
come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me
vastly; these included 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 26th 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 loomed 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 7th 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 two hundred 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 scoriaceous peak towered up some
twelve thousand seven hundred feet against the eastern sky, like a
Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama, while beyond it rose the white,
ghostlike height of Mt. Terror, ten thousand nine hundred 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:
"--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, myriad 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 fifty-five 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
rigors of this sort. The barrier camp was semipermanent, 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 six
hundred to seven hundred 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 breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop
flight of our squadron on November 21st 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 coast line.
At last we were truly entering the white, æon-dead world of the
ultimate south. Even as we realized it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen
in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of almost fifteen
thousand 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 13th to
15th.
We were some eight thousand five hundred feet above sea-level. 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 report.
In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring
revealed their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings
and fragments; notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such
mollusks as linguellæ and gastropods--all of which seemed of real
significance in connection 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, Daniels, all six of the students,
four mechanics, and myself 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 five
hundred 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
in 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 program, 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 that 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 five
hundred 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 revolutionizing the entire sciences of
biology and geology.
His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 11th to 18th
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 Archæan 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
program--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
æon-long death.
Lake's subexpedition into the unknown, as every one 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 meters.
The start was made January 22nd 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 three hundred miles away from us. Six hours after that a second
and very excited message told of the frantic, beaverlike 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 dispatched
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 fifteen hundred
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 seven hundred 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
thirty-five thousand 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 sky line
effects--regular sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks. Whole
thing marvelous 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 Captain 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 eleven
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 twenty-one thousand 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-colored
rock than any visible strata on slopes proper, hence an evidently
crystalline origin. Close flying shows 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 thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand feet. Am
up twenty-one thousand five hundred 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 at 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
connection with this business I called Captain 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.
[Illustration: _It was a queer state of sensations--being in the lee of
vast, silent pinnacles, where 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 thirty thousand to thirty-four thousand 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 rose abruptly.
I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words--flashed
across a glacial void of seven hundred 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
Captain Douglas at their widely separated bases. 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 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 labors, however, were not very steady after four 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 showed an entire
absence of those Archæan and primordial strata for which he was
looking, and which formed so great a part of the colossal peaks that
loomed up at a tantalizing distance from the camp.
Most of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and Comanchean
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 five hundred million years older. It was clear
to him that in order to recover the Archæan 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 program; hence, he 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 Comanchean 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 subterrane 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 palæontologist could have counted or
classified in a year. Mollusks, crustacean armor, 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 every one
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 æons.
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 dispatch 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 labyrinthodonta and thecoiidea, great mosasaur skull
fragments, dinosaur vertebræ and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and
wing bones, Archaeopteryx débris, Miocene sharks' teeth, primitive
bird skulls, and other bones of archaic mammals such as Palæotheres,
Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons, and Titanotheriidæ.
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 Comanchean 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, mollusks, 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 three hundred 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
five hundred thousand 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 dispatched 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 organization 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 archæan slate, proving that source
survived from over six hundred million years ago to Comanchean
times without more than moderate morphological changes and decrease
in average size. Comanchean prints apparently more primitive or
decadent, if anything, than older ones. Emphasize 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
Archæozoic cells. Was evolved and specialized not later than a
thousand million years ago, when planet was young and recently
uninhabitable for any life forms of 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 bones. 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 center of surface. Small, smooth depression in center 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 odor. 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, three and five tenths feet central
diameter, tapering to one 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 membranous, stretched on framework of
glandular tubing. Apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at wing
tips. Ends of body shriveled, 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 archæan 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 three and five tenths feet central diameter, one foot end
diameters. Dark gray, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot
membranous wings of same color, found folded, spread out of furrows
between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, or lighter
gray, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge.
Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical,
stavelike ridges, are five systems of light-gray flexible arms or
tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum
length of over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single
stalks three inches diameter branch after six inches into five
substalks, each of which branches after eight inches into five
small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total
of twenty-five tentacles.
At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like
suggestions, holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent
head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colors.
Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch
flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact
center 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 saclike swellings of same color
which, upon pressure, open to bell-shaped orifices two 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-gray pseudoneck, without
gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement.
Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven inches
diameter at base to about two and five tenths at point. To each
point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membranous
triangle eight inches long and six wide at farther end. This is the
paddle, fin, or pseudofoot which had 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 three inches diameter at base to one 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 pseudoneck and end of torso,
corresponding to projections at other end.
Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but
odds now favor 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 vegetablelike,
suggesting vegetable's essential up-and-down structure rather than
animal's fore-and-aft structure. Fabulously early date of evolution,
preceding even simplest archæan 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?
[Illustration: "_I've got to dissect one of these things before_----"
"_First the world's greatest mountains--then this!_"]
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 Captain 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, sending more messages, 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 organization, and pertained
to some paleocene 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 odor
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 thirty-seven 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 connection
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
pre-naturally 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 gangliar centers and connectives arguing the very
extremes of specialized 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 to-day. It reproduced like the vegetable cryptogams,
especially the pteridophyta; 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 archæan 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 showed decadence rather than higher evolution.
The size of the pseudofeet 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 two-thirty 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 showed
signs of unfolding; but Lake did not believe there was any danger of
immediate decomposition in the almost subzero 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 marvelous 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 dispatched 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.
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
two 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 favorable. 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 special 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 seven
thirty; 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 seven fifteen a.m., January 25th, we started 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 dispatched 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 nonstop 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 witchlike cones
and pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent every one 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. It was 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 ultradimensionality. 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 æon-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 sky line--regularities like clinging fragments
of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which
indeed justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of
primordial temple ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and
strangely painted by Roerich.
There was indeed something hauntingly Roerichlike 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 archæan 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 archæan 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 vapors 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. 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 disks, and strange, beetling,
tablelike 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 needlelike 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 dizzily up like a fearsome rampart of
giants, their curious regularities showing 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.
Every one, 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. There were eleven known dead, young Gedney was missing.
People pardoned our hazy lack of details through realization 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 pulverized; 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 archæan 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 inclosure near
the camp being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that,
though the greater breakage, on the side next to 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 four 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
noncommittal 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 harbored 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 one a.m., Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an
admirably stiff upper lip. It took no persuasion to make him promise
not to show 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 that 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 archæan
slate and other very primal crumpled strata unchanged since at least
middle Comanchean time, 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 superplateau as ancient and unchanging as the
mountains themselves--twenty thousand 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,
reconnoitering, and rock-collecting program 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 æon-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. 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 nonstop 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 palæontologists to the highest pitch, though we were
sensible enough not to show 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 showing 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 superplateau 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 organizing, 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 we know may end the
world. 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 awful mountain wall.
I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the
disarranged machinery, the varied uneasiness 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 demon mountain wind must have been enough to drive
any man mad in the midst of this center 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 archæan 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 odor emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say.
* * * * *
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 inclosure--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 realized that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried
things we had found--the one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful
odor--must represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake
had tried to analyze.
On and around that laboratory table were strewn 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
thirty-five 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 archæan 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 archæan entities; and we agreed
that the suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitized minds
of Lake's overwrought party.
For madness--centering 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 naïve as
to deny that each of us may have harbored 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 seven
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 noncommittal 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 that hidden
transmontane 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,
æon-cursed desolation--the responsibility for unnamable and perhaps
immeasurable 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 twenty-three thousand or twenty-four thousand
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 twelve thousand 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 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 unfavorable 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 while Danforth drove; and at
times I 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 archæan 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
æons 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 Macchu 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 nonvolcanic in evident structure.
The curious cave mouths, near which the odd formation 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 æsthetic 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 twenty-three thousand
five hundred and seventy 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 dreamlike.
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 vapors 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
eurythmic 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 twenty thousand feet high,
and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less
than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the
vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of
mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and
artificial cause.
[Illustration: _The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable!
Some fiendish violation of natural law!_]
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.
[Illustration: _It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the
mirage--in stark, objective reality!_]
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 demonic plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men
of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their prehuman
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 semientity.
* * * * *
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 ten to one hundred and fifty 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 where the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and
immemorial débris. Where the glaciation was transparent we could see
the lower parts of the gigantic piles, and we 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. It 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 æons we had thought prehuman, 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 center 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 Palæogæan megalopolis compared with which the fabled
Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoë in the
land of Lomar are recent things of to-day--not even of yesterday;
a megalopolis ranking with such whispered prehuman 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 showed no major change in the
labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpselike 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 semiremembrances 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 twelve
thirty p.m. in coming down on a smooth, hard snow field wholly devoid
of obstacles and well adapted to a swift and favorable take-off 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 actually able to touch
its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an
unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten æons normally
closed to our species.
This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps three hundred feet from
point to point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular
size, averaging 6 x 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 of which the 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 vapors 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 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 showed 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 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 débris-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 program 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 Comanchean 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
five hundred thousand 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 showed 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-edged 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 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 showed 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 was 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 débris 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 realizing
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 connection 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 crystallize 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 æon, 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 connection with this
place.
VI.
It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of
our wanderings inside that cavernous, æon-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 flash-light 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, characterized 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 one hundred 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 x 30 feet
in floor area, and twenty 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
realized, 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 æsthetically
evolved to the highest degree of civilized 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 skillful
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 formalized 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 countersunk low relief,
their background being depressed about two inches from the original
wall surface.
In some specimens marks of a former coloration could be detected,
though for the most part the untold æons had disintegrated and banished
any pigments which may have been applied. The more one studied the
marvelous technique the more one admired the things. Beneath their
strict conventionalization one could grasp the minute and accurate
observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very
conventions themselves served to symbolize and accentuate the real
essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated.
We felt, too, that besides these recognizable 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 favor--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 naïve and terrible corroboration to what
we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dados.
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 movables were absent; but the
sculptures gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once
filled these tomblike, echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the
floors were generally thick with detritus, litter, and débris, 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 we had seen in other structures, 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 æon-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 naïve 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
Dinosauria 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 archæan 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 scarabæus, 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 realization 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 Dinosauria were not indeed Dinosauria, but far worse. Mere
Dinosauria 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 fossilized 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
prehuman 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 preterrestrial life of the star-headed
beings on other planets, 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 two hundred
feet square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly been an
educational center 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 favorites
with different decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant
versions of the same theme proved useful in settling debatable points
and filling up 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 eventually appear in an
official bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only
the salient highlights 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
membranous 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 to-day, 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 mechanized life on other planets, but had receded upon finding
its effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness
of organization and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly
able to live on a high plane without the more specialized 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 molding 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 synthesized 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 Palæogæan
cities, including that whose æon-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 showed vast clusters of needlelike spires, delicate finials
on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin, horizontal
scalloped disks capping cylindrical shafts.
This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous
mirage, cast by a dead city whence such sky-line features had been
absent for thousands and ten 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 pseudofeet. 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 pseudofeet, 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
pressure 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 facts 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.
[Illustration: _The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even
terrific pressures were powerless to harm them!_]
The beings multiplied by means of spores--like vegetable pteridophyta,
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 prothallia except when
they had new regions to colonize.
The young matured swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond
any standard we can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and æsthetic
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 marvelously, 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 become 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 nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had
no biological basis for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed
to organize large households on the principles of comfortable
space-utility and--as we deduced from the pictured occupations and
diversions of codwellers--congenial mental association.
In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the center of the
huge rooms, leaving all 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 colonizing 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
palæontology.
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 Archæan Age, there was no interruption in their
civilization 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 neighboring 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 æons
passed.
Another map shows 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 centers 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 prehuman
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 center of the Old
Ones' civilization, and all the 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
archæologist 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 molding 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 modeled their tough plasticity into various
useful temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modeling powers
were sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative
forms implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a
semistable 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 one hundred and fifty million years ago, when
a veritable war of resubjugation 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
marvelously 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 showed 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 shown 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--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 nonterrestrial 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 ethics 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
complimentary 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 showing the Carboniferous of a 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 primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic
continent.
Other charts--and most significantly one in connection with the
founding fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around
us--showed all the present continents well differentiated. And in
the latest discoverable specimen--dating perhaps from the Pliocene
Age--the approximate world of to-day 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 showed 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
membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones.
Destruction of cities through the up-thrust 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 center 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 recognize
in the sculptures, but which stretched fully a 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 special 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.
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
neighboring rift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying
the story of the region, much beyond the Pliocene map, whence we
derived our last general glimpse of the prehuman world. This was the
last place we examined in detail, since what we found there set upon 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. 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°, East 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 honor 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 Comanchean 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 forty thousand 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 three hundred 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 prehuman 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 showed 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, æon-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 marvelous 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
somber and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shown 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 five hundred thousand 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--five hundred thousand 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 shown in the houses, and winter travelers
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
neighboring black abyss of subterrane waters.
In the end, it seems to have been the neighboring abyss which received
the greatest colonization. This was partly due, no doubt, to the
traditional sacredness of this special 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 chiseling 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 of a mile toward
the ancient rivercourse, 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 insure 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 showed 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 mold 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
marvelous 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 realize 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 splendors 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 recognize the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate,
the æon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale
sculptural denudation, though all the best separate statues, like other
movables, had been taken away.
The decadent cartouches and dados 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
recognized, for the sculptures showed 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 live stock 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 shows 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 water?
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 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 showed
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
chiseled 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 neighboring
tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs about
the great abyss, down whose side 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 realized we must begin the
quest at once if we expected to include it in our present trip.
In was now eight 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 gotten 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 of a mile from where
we stood; the intervening space showing solid-looking buildings quite
likely to be penetrable still at a subglacial 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
southern tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighboring
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
débris, 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 tantalized by the sculptured walls
along our route.
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 eight thirty p.m., Danforth's keen young
nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual.
If we had had a dog with us, I suppost 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 reached
only too definitely. Let me try to state the thing without flinching.
There was an odor--and that odor 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 débris.
Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was
likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the débris 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 latter 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 odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a
more frightful odor--less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely
appalling in this place under the known circumstances--unless, of
course, Gedney----For the odor 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 æons, 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 autohypnotism--or vague thoughts of
responsibility toward Gedney--of 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 daylight kept the
blackness from being absolute.
Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by
occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed débris 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 carved walls of the blocked
corridor in which we stood, showed several doorways in various
states of obstruction; and from one of them the gasoline odor--quite
submerging that other hint of odor--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 débris 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 any one 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 discovered a
place where the floor débris had been disturbed. 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 leveling of the débris, 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 odor even at this extreme superplateau 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 prehuman
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 neighboring 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 paralyzed 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 neighboring 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 shown on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at
once recognized it as a monstrous cylindrical tower in the 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 subglacial 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 neighboring
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 débris or litter underfoot; 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 æsthetic outlet for the Old Ones.
About nine-thirty 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 two hundred feet in
diameter--strewn with débris 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 splendor 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 zikkurats 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 subglacial 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 center of an immense
circular plaza, and had been perhaps five hundred or six hundred
feet high, with tiers of horizontal disks near the top, and a row of
needlelike 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 showed sad
battering; whilst the choking was such that all the archways seemed to
have been 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 subglacial 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 débris 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 débris,
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 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 somber
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 æon-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 out tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste
utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life.
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 familiarized 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 subglacial 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 débris 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 showed 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
realize 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 a 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 notion or
tried to increase their meat supply? We doubted whether that pungent
odor 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 flare-up 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.
Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which made us
gasp involuntarily--a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep
underground, fully a 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 chiseled jambs and lintel.
From that cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air
and perhaps even a suspicion of vapor 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 mountaintop 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-channeled rising of some such vapor 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 later, 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 shown 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 vapor 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 cloths 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 odor--of what nature we could not guess, though we
thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterrane 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 seventy-five
feet long and fifty 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 débris,
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 fetor 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 have previously encountered.
The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, 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 realized, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones' sculpture
at the time of the tunneling, 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 countersunk 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.
Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we
resumed our advance after a cursory look.
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 odor was abominably strong, and we
could detect scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent.
Puffs of visible vapor 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 added sensitiveness that memory re-inspired 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 fetor, 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 demonic 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 realized 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 fetor 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 one hundred and fifty
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 resubjugation.
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 Heaven! 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 odor whose
cause only a diseased fancy could envisage--clung to those bodies
and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly
resculptured 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 defense 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? Lord, 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
worshiped 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 recognizing 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 æons 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.
[Illustration: _And then came a sound--a horrible sound--which enabled
us to run like mad for the sane outer air_----]
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 nonaggressive 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 a 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 fetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm
whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to recarve
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
demon message was--but those burials at Lake's camp had shown 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
traveling 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, spiraling 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 vapors 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 resculptured 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 semivision
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 centered on the
problem of escape, we were in no condition to observe and analyze
details; yet even so our latent brain cells must have wondered at the
message brought them by our nostrils. Afterward, we realized what it
was--that our retreat from the fetid 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 neighborhood of the prostrate things that new and lately
unexplainable fetor 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 center 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!_"
Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the
rest of the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant a 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 vaulting ahead,
and--thank Heaven--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 incredible
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
colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow.
But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as
the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly
onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and
driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss
vapor.
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 demonic Shoggoths--given life, though, 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.
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 showing beyond
the more crumbled structures toward the east.
The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice vapors,
and the cold clutched at our vitals.
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.
Halfway uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing
spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic 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 vapors 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 dreamlike against the beckoning rose
color 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;
harborers of nameless horrors and Archæan 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.
If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told
truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than three
hundred 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.
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 sloping--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 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 honeycombings inside them, and of the frightful amorphous
entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming sway 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 vapors 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 take-off over the nightmare city.
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 twenty-four thousand 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.
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.
* * * * *
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 those echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains
of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, demonic glimpse,
among the churning westward zenith clouds, of what lay back of those
other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and
feared.
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 cylinders," "the
elder pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color 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 these 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!_"
THE END
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