This extraordinarily evocative tale, the third and best of Lovecraft's short novels, akes use of a setting—the Antarctic continent—that had fascinated Lovecraft since Tldhood, when he had written treatises on the explorations of Wilkes, Borchgrevink, ° ' Amundsen, and others. Lovecraft also followed Admiral Byrd's explorations SC°i928-30 with care. His frequent citations of the Himalayan artwork of Nicholas ° 'ch reflects the thrill he received at seeing Roerich's paintings in the Nicholas ch Museum in New York. Lovecraft was, however, devastated when Weird ' cted the story. It languished in manuscript for years until the young Julius Tales reje ^ Lovecraft's agent, sold it to Astounding Stories, where it was serial- i^inthe February, March, and April 1936 issues. I. IAM FORCED INTO SPEECH BECAUSE MEN OF SCIENCE HAVE REFUSED TO FOLLOW my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap_ and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in my favour; for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures; notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over. In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitious programme r j .aoo Tt ic an unfortunate fact that rela-■ *e region of those mountains of madness It . munto* My obscure men like myself and my associates, connectedI onywi diversity, have little chance of making an impression where matters of wddly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerneA ^ ^ fa It is further against us that we are not, m the ^ ^ ^ Wds which came primarily to be concerned. As B *f deep_level H *e Miskatonic University Expedition was w o 7^ continent, aided by sP<*imens of rock and soil from various parts at H. P. Lov the remarkable drill devised by Prof. Frank H. Pabodie of OUr partmenr. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field rhan / ^^rim, that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different point ^ but I di Thods of collection. Pabodie's drilling apparatUs r ° UnreaOied b°Us,V unique and radical in us P^c ^ explo' ordinary me' ^ fr0in "bine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the princ.p,^^ ^tlcular rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of Va; hardness Steel head, join. " nted rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick d Jphernaiia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional piping 7 e ,dy. bores five inches wide and up to 1000 feet deep all formed, with needed accesso, n0 greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry; this being made by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were Four large Dornier aeroplanes, designed espectally for the tremendous alti^ flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-warming and 1 USt° ng°!lSche for gasoii^, provisions, dynamite, and other supply. JJ""* 3 St0"g ire needed to carry the actual exploring material, the ftftfa JJ Jj r Jg- fro, the^ » case all our esplonng planes were los, L ot using all ^ other planes for moving apparatus we would employ 0„e or " h a smmie transportation service between this cache and another permanem on the great pkeau from 600 to 700 miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempest, thatr*^ down from the plateau, we determined to dispense with intermediate baseS; taking chances in the interest of economy and probable efficiency. Wireless reports have spoken of the breath-taking four-hour non-stop gga of our squadron on November 21 over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on the west, and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our engines, wind troubled us only moderately, and our radio compasses helped us through the one opaque fog we encountered- When the vast rise loomed ahead, between Latitudes 83° and 84°, we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coastline. At last we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of the ultimate south, and even as we realised it we saw the peak of Mt. N arisen in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of almost 15,000 feet. The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude W % East Longaude 174° 23', and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and short aen> r*** fbgba, arc natters of history; as is the arduous and triumphant ascent ofMt. Nan** by Pafaoc&e and two of the graduate students—Gedney and Carrol^-* DecrH*CT We were some 8500 feet above sea-level, and when expe ""raW «*d ground only twelve feet down through the snow and «* * rimen&l ndttf* and a** «** poma. ve made conaderable use of the small melting apparatus Vama»ig at many places where no previous « «2^5mnml The pre-Cambrian granites aiid Z^"*?"?" obc««f confirmed our belief that this plateau was ■* ^ jT^^^^me continent to die we*, but somewhat •W«dl^ad^^^-whkh we then though1» rf though Byrd h* since disproved the hypo***** jc mountatns of madness at thfc • 729 • (n certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiselled after boring revealed & nature, we foundI some highly interesting fossil markmgs and fragments-„otably seaweeds, tnlobues, crinoids, and such mollusc, as Hngube and ^teropods^-all of which seemed of real significance in connexion with the Lion's primordial history. There was also a queer triangular, striated marking ^out 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 int 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 die sedimentary rocks. Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself produces odd distorting effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression. On January 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, all six of the students, four mechanics, and I flew directly over the south pole in two of the great planes, being forced down once by a sudden high wind which fortunately did not develop into a typical storm. This was, as the papers have stated, one of several observation flights; during others of which we tried to discern new topographical features in areas unreached by previous explorers. Our early flights were disappointing in this latter respect; though they afforded us some magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying, owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two. At length we resolved to carry out our original pian of flying 500 miles eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point *bich would probably be on the smaller continental division, as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable for purposes °f comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent; lime-juice well offsetting ** iteady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperarures generally above šero ^Itng us to do without our thickest furs. 11 was now rtudsummer, and wrth haste ^ <** we might be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious winter-2 the long antarctic night. Several savage windstorms bad burst upon us ^ ^ west, but we had escaped damage through the skill of Atwood in devising ^"•entarv aeroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and rem- H. P. Lov . 730 PI the Fountains or Madness faring .he principal camp buildings with snow. Our good luck and efficietlcy ^ ' *Aeed been almost uncanny. The outside world knew, of course, of our programme, and Wai also of Lake's strange and dogged insistence on a westward-^ ^ northwestward-prospecting trip before our radical shaft to the new base. h seems he had pondered a great deal, and with alarmingly radical daring, 0Ver that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into « 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 forma. tion 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 trilo-bite stage. These fragments, with their odd marking, must have been 500 million to a thousand million years old. II. POPULAR imagination, 1 judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of Lake's start northwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or penetrated by human imagination; though we did not mention his wild hopes of revolutionising the entire sciences of biology and geology. His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 11-18 with Pabodie and ft* others—marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset when crossing one of the great pressure-ridges in the ice—had brought up more and more of the Archaean slate; and even I was interested by the singular profusion of evident fossil markings ■ that unbelievably ancient stratum. These markings, however, were of very ?W nve We-forms involving no great paradox except that any life-forms should occur * rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed to see tW goo sense of Lake's demand for an interlude in our time-saving progn^rj S ;0: t ^apparatus-1 *»>«^pian; base with l50linesupP^afl£l While they were gone, I would remain at the base thistranZ^2* T ^ P1^ *» ** -stward shift. In this tr f 1131 Plans I ^^^^^^^^ ' bUt tbs C0"W wait temporarily. I kept with me one seem to be °f ^ « " 0Ck *** ^ *We strata on LL.^r an evident ^taliine origin. SwZT ^ 0n Sl°peS Pr°PCr' ^ allv te^ri„ oJT 56 flym8 sh*™ niany cave-mouths, some unusual Thi^ I saw rarn' * Semicirc»J«- You must come and investigate- 30,000 to 35 000 f,fa"SCIUarely 0n t0P of one peak. Height seems abou .uf mountains of Madness at ™ • 733 thistles and pipes through passes and in and out of caves, but no flying dange rer 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 thai 1 would join him as soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie and 1 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 aeroplane activities, would need a great deal delivered for the new base which he was to establish at the foot of the mountains; and it was possible chat the eastward flight might not be made after all this season. In connexion with this business I called Capt. Douglas and asked him to get as much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the single dog-team we had left there. A direct route across the unknown region between Lake and McMurdo Sound was what we really ought to establish. Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where Moulton's plane had been forced down, and where repairs had already progressed somewhat. The ice-sheet was very thin, with dark ground here and there visible, and he would sink some borings and blasts at that very point before making any sledge trips or climbing expeditions. He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and the queer state of his sensations at being in the lee of vast silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at the world's rim. Atwood's theodolite observations had placed the height of the five tallest peaks at from 30,000 to 34,000 feet. The windswept nature of the terrain clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the occasional existence of prodigious gales violent beyond anything we had so far encountered. His camp lay a little more than five miles from where the higher foothills abruptly rose. I could almost trace a note of ^conscious alarm in his words—flashed across a glacial void of 700 miles—as he Urged dfct we all hasten with the matter and get the strange new region disposed aUSS°°n35possii,le- He was31)01,1 torestnow>afteracontinuousdaySWrt°f st unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and results. In 4e morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Capt. Dl°Uglas at their widely separated bases; and it was agreed that one of Lake s fQan'S *°"ld come to my base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as well as r a11 the &el j, could The rest of ^ faei ^don, depending on our deci- an easterly trip, could wait for a few days; since Lake had enough for minediatp___, f. . _ n .u. „u cnthorn base ought to be till the next res/,16 heat and borings. Eventually the old southern base OU ' °CH but if we postponed the easterly trip we would not use it .734. * UV*C*^ summer, and meanwhile Lake must send a plane to explore a direct route be-his new mountains and McMurdo Sound Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or 1^ ^ ^ light be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straif;ht ^ case mis Lake's base to the Arkham w.thout returning to tins spot. Some „f 0Ur conjm tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided^ complete the job of making a permanent Esquimau village. Owing to a very !ibera| tent supply, Lake had with him all that his base would need even after our arrival I wirelessed that Pabodie and 1 would be ready for the northwestward move after one day's work and one night's rest. Our labours, however, were not very steady after 4 p.m.; for about that time Lake began sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day had started unpropitiously; since an aeroplane survey of the nearly exposed rock surfaces shewed an entire absence of those Archaean and primordial strata for which he was looking, and which formed so great a part of the colossal peaks that loomed up at a tantalising distance from the camp. Most of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists, with now and then a glossy black outcropping suggesting a hard and slaty coal. This rather discouraged Lake, whose plans all hinged on unearthing specimens more than 500 million years older. It was clear to him that in order to recover the Archaean slate vein in which he had found the odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from these foothills to the steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves. He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of the expedition's general programme; hence set up the drill and put five men to work with it while the rest finished settling the camp and repairing the damaged aeroplane. 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 *> I. ! a"d y°u"g Gedney-the acting foreman-rushed into the camp *>* the stardmg news. a ve.nhoTrhad ' ^ ^in ** boring ^ sandstone had given ph* J J>i of Comanchian limestone fitf of ^ ^ hal ds, corals, ecb* ZEZZ °CCaSl0nal "W*™ of siliceous sponges and **** ^d ye22? f ^ * vertebrate fossils the strai :l„rhen *«* aWard the drill-head dropped **** the Mountains oh Madness AT J n • 73S . ^nt spread among the excavators. A good-sized blast had Laid open the subterrene secret; and now, through a .agged aperture perhaps five fee, across and three feet thick, the^ yawned before the avid searchers a section of shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fifty m.Ihon 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 „fT 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 alt else was the vast deposit of shells and bones which in places nearly choked the passage. Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree-ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan-palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species than the greatest palaeontologist could have counted or classified in a year. Molluscs, crustacean armour, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals—great and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp shouting, and no wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting cold to where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished aeons. When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity he scribbled a message in his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to despatch it by wireless. This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mososaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armour-plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing-bones, archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks' teeth, primitive bird-skulls, and skulls, vertebrae, and other bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, xiphodons, dinocerases, eohippi, oreodons, and titanotheres. There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer, or bovine animal; hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the Oli-8°<*ne age, and that the hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried, dead, and •"accessible 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 imbedded fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchian and "01 a particle earlier; the free fragments in the hollow space included a sur- "-- to far older Mir ----ltt piuoaoiy oi teliosts sharks and eanoias. r^L,^lc earner; cne iree iragiucu« '....... *PParem vacancy, . vholiy new ^ doub[y intense waVe of '—even rudimentary fishes, molluscs, and corals as remote as the Silurian ~, . . .. . , _____.L. in rhis oart of the world there ---mmmmi , j---- , "raovician. The inevitable inference was that in this part h-r lovecraft had been a remarkable and unique degree of continuity between the life of , 300 million years ago I id extended b . rse past all speculation. In any event, the coming of the frightful ice fa J ovet tinuity and that of only thirty million years ago. How far this r had extended beyond the Ohgocene age when the cavern was closed, Was Pleistocene some 500,000 years ago-a mere yesterday as compared with the age of this cavity—must have put an end to any of the primal forms which had locally managed to oudive their common terms. Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletin written and despatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get back. After that Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes; transmitting to —and to the Arkham for relaying to the outside world—the frequent postscripts which Lake sent him by a succession of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers will remember the excitement created among men of science by that afternoon's reports—reports which have finally led, after all these years, to the organisation of that very Starkweather-Moore Expedition which I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I had better give the messages literally as Lake sent them, and as our base operator McTighe translated them from his pencil shorthand. "Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone fragments from blasts. Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate, proving that source survived from over 600 million years ago to Comanchian times without more than moderate morphological changes and decrease in average size. Comanchian prints apparendy more primitive or decadent, if anything, than older ones. Emphasise importance of discovery in press. Will mean to biology ^ Emstem has meant to mathematics and physics. Joins up with my previous work and amplifies conclusions. Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that has seen whole cycle or cycles of organic life before known one that egms with Archaeozoic cells. Was evolved and specialised not later than jusand nullion years ago, when planet was young and recendy nrn^-wtntT'^^^--^iprotoplasmicstructure. Questional »wnere, and how developn pment took place." "Later, er. . saurians aJtT^n& ce«tain «1»! . * ^"y stru Pnmitive "namnm f ^Pnents of large land and marine tamai of*** "ot **w2 Singu,ar ,ocaJ wounds or in'uries" P^ttlvha? Ped0A °f two 10 kn°Wn P^atory or carnivorous ^^o^ o S°^traight, penetrant bores, and aP- 0r cases of cleanly severed bone. Not AT THE Mountains of Madness t ?3? many specimens affected. Am sending to camp for electric torches. Will extend search area underground by hacking away stalactites." "Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across and an inch and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation. Greenish, but no evidences to place its period. Has curious smoothness and regularity. Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage at inward angles and in centre of surface. Small, smooth depression in centre of unbroken surface. Arouses much curiosity as to source and weathering. Probably some freak of water action. Carroll, with magnifier, thinks he can make out additional markings of geologic significance. Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns. Dogs growing uneasy as we work, and seem to hate this soapstone. Must see if it has any peculiar odour. Will report again when Mills gets back with light and we start on underground area." "10:15 p.m. Important discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins, working underground at 9:45 with light, found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by mineral salts. Tough as leather, but astonishing flexibility retained in places. Marks of broken-off parts at ends and around sides. Six feet end to end, 3.5 feet central diameter, tapering to I foot at each end. Like a ban-el 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. AH 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 membrane-°us, stretched on framework of glandular tubing. Apparent minute ori-fu*s in frame tubing at wing tips. Ends of body shrivelled, giving no clue to interior or to what has been broken off there. Must dissect when we get ba<* 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 fouH but these must wait. Having trouble with dogs. They can't endure the "ew specimen, and would probably tear it to pieces if we d.dn t keep aU distance from them." H ****** «,|-»P M- ***** Dyer, P«»*die. Douglas. Matter of highest_, «C transcendent-importance. ***** must relay to HMd Surion « once. Strang barrel growth * rhe Archaean thing that Je« prints in Mills. Boudrea... and Fowler discover cluster of dur-^ ^ « underground point torn- feet Irotti aperture. Mtxed with curioralv 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 diis right. "Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot five-ridged barrel torso 3.5 reet central diameter, 1 foot end diameters. Dark grey, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membraneous wings of same colour, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, of lighter grey, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges, are five systems of light grey flexible arms or tentacles found rightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over 3 feet. Like arras of primitive crinoid. Single stalks 3 inches diameter branch after 6 inches into five sub-stalks, each of which branches after 8 inches into five small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of 25 tentacles. "At top of torso blunt bulbous neck of lighter grey with gill-like suggestions holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colours. Head thick and pufty, about 2 feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellow- ish tubes projecting from each breathii bably "aperture At e d P°mt S1" eX3Ct centre of t0P Pra lowiso membrane rolls h b *"* ^ *" SPhericaJ expansion where yd-^«Mly an eye. Five J!tV* handii"g to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, 0f starfish.shaped . m? longer reddish tubes start from inner angles UP°n PresSUre 0pen JT 6nd ,n *>c-Iike swellings of same colour which 7 ^ with sharp wh, Shaped orifices 2 inches maximum diameter eSandP°«"tScIin P^ntS0 «arfish.nead found folded tight]ydown; T Vast «ougbae«. ° Uh0US "«* and torso. Flexibility surprising ead" ^LTrS0.tOU8h bm di^^ilarly functioning «=°"f 8°*«- exist. Bulbous Hght-grey pseudo-neck, ^ ^ thk MOUNTAINS ov Madness 739 suggestions, holds greenish hve-pointed starfish-arrangement. Tough muscular arms 4 reet long and tapering from 7 inches diameter at base to about 2.5 at point. To each point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membraneous triangle 8 inches long and 6 wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudo-foot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old. From inner angles of starfish-arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes tapenng from 3 inches diameter at base to 1 at tip. Orifices at tips. All these pans infinitely-tough and leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used tor locomotion of some son, marine or otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated muscularity. As found, all these projections tightly folded over pseudo-neck and end of torso, corresponding to projections at other end. "Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but odds now favour animal. Probably represents incredibly advanced evolution of radiata without loss of certain primitive features. JEchinoderm resemblances unmistakable despite local contradictory evidences. Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat, but may have use in water navigation. Symmetry is curiously vegetable-like, suggesting vegetable's essentially up-and-down structure rather than animal's fore-and-aft structure. Fabulously early date of evolution, preceding even simplest Archaean protozoa hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to origin. "Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomuon 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 f°lklore 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 sta-laSmites deposited above them. Hard work hewing out, but toughness P^vented damage. State of preservation miraculous, evidendy owing to lln*stone action. No more found so far, but will resume search later. Job to get f0Urteen huge speamens to camp without dogs, which bark furiously and can't be trusted near them. With nine S^rd the dogs^we ought to manage the three sledges fairly weK, though *ind is *Z w..... .K_______ „,™ation with McMurdo Sound is bad. Must establish plane communication 74« H. P. Lo and begin shipping material. But I've got to dissect one of rj,e3e before we take any rest. Wish I bad a real laboratory here. Dyer 7**» kick himself for having tried to stop my westward trip. First the ' greatest mountains, and then this. If this last isn't the high spo^ expedition, I don't know what is. We're made scientifically c ° the Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the cave. Now will Arkha^^' repeat description? " P ease The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this rerxm beyond description, nor were our companions much behind us in enthusias Tighe, who had hastily translated a few high spots as they came from the oV ^ receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his shorthand version as Lake's operator signed off. All appreciated the epoch-making significance"T discovery, and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as the Arkham s operator h 6 repeated back the descriptive parts as requested; and my example was followed b Sherman from his station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache, as well as by Ca 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 aerial travel impossible. But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish disappointment. Lake was sending more messages, and toid 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 tmigfrness. Lake was puzzled as to how he might mate »ne requisite incisions without violence destructive enough to upset all the struc-2^™**" ** loofa"g ^ He had, it is true, seven more perfect spec*** but these were too few to use up recklessly unless the cave might later yield «i hmited «pp|y. Accordingly he removed the specimen and dragged in one it ^ tamma °{ ** ^h-arrangementa at both ends, was b*W crushed and partly disrupted along one of the great torso furrows. the Mountains of Madness AT 1 • 741 . Results, qukkly 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 bewil-dered. Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no product of any cell-growth science knows about. There had been scarcely any mineral replacement, and despite an age of perhaps forty million years the internal organs were wholly intact. The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality waS an inherent attribute of the thing's form of organisation; and pertained to some paiaeogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation. At first all that Lake found was dry, but as the heated tent produced its thawing effect, organic moisture of pungent and offensive odour was encountered toward the thing's uninjured side. It was not blood, but a thick, dark-green fluid apparemly answering the same purpose. By the time Lake reached this stage all 37 dogs had been brought to the still uncompleted corral near the camp; and even at that distance set up a savage barking and show of resdessness 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 interna] inspection brought up so many vegetable evidences that Lake was left hopelessly at sea. It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base. Cursorily, one would say that its respiratory apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide; and there were odd evidences of air-storage chambers and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two other fully developed breathing-systems— gills and pores. Clearly, it was amphibian and probably adapted to long airless hibernation-periods as well. Vocal organs seemed present in connexion with the main respiratory system, but they presented anomalies beyond immediate solution. Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable-utterance, seemed barely conceivable; but musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly probable. The muscular system was almost preternamrally developed. The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast. Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing had a set of ganglial centres and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialised development. Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced; and there were signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry cilia of the head, involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism. Probably it had more than five senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from any existing analogy. It must, Late thought, have been a creature of keen sensitiveness and delicately Wtions in its primal world; much like the ants and bees of today. It reproduced 742 H. P. L ovE C*Aft l,ke the vegetable cryptogams, especially the ptendophytes; having Spore.cases the rips of the wings and evidently developing from a thahus or prothallUs at But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a radiate b was dearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but had three-f0urths 0r ? 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 aerial. How it could have undergone its tremendously complex evolution on a new-born earth in time to leave prints in Archaean rocks was so far beyond conception as to make Lake whimsically recall the primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth-life as a joke or mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from Outside told by a folklorist colleague in Miskatonic's English department. Naturally, he considered the possibility of the pre-Cambrian prints' having been made by a less evolved ancestor of the present specimens; but cruickly rejected mis too facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the older fossils. If anything, the later contours shewed decadence rather than higher evolution. The size of the pseudo-feet had decreased, and the whole morphology seemed coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs just examined held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether, little could be said to have been solved; and Lake fell back on mythology for a provisional name—jocosely dubbing his finds "The Elder Ones." At about 2:30 a.m., having decided to postpone further work and get a little rest, he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged from the laboratory tent, and studied the intact specimens with renewed interest. The ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a trifle, so that the head-points and tubes of two or three shewed signs of unfolding; but Lake did not believe there ^ any danger of immediate decomposition in the almost sub-zero air. He &> however, move all the undissected specimens closer together and throw a spare te over them in order r ' keep their nossihl £° °ff the direct *>lar rays. That would also help to ^S vhiehZ 31 9imaaM distance ^d behind the higher and higher ^hich an ' ----'^wmwuhuiiq we mgn" •— ~ , uejr * — to hoTd - d0Wn «* — of the tent-cloth with heavy ^ ** 10 «Wiver soSl *" rismS ^ *>r *e «an mOUn!am! 3* ^tarctic winds were S6Vere blas^ Early apprehensions about s^ ^ takentobankthetPnf-fn for Ae fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devo-* Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself. Leng, wherever * or time it mi ht bfood was not a reglc,n I would care to be in or near; I -ash the proximity of a world mat had ever bred such ambiguou a monstrosities as Ise Lake had just mentioned At the moment He ^ *« I had ever read the abhorred Necronomtcon, or talked so much with that Pantry erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the university *h b**t upon us from the increasingly opalescent zen.th as we 746 mountains and began to H- P- LovEcR make out the cumulative undulations of the g> Aft 0ihills. had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks some of theni as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present sample; but this one had a J vel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the Seethi/ 110' iabyrinthof fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the trouble ice-vapours above our heads. The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man 0r to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embody, ing monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs; and strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters ol 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 h 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 tap0 to look earthward again, and saw mat our journey's end was not far off The unknown mountains ^ rQse d ^ ^ n rf giants, * T~ "i?"*- ^ng with startling clearness even without a iM+» were ovpr fk» i___ i- — were over the lowest foothills now, and could see amidst the sn h ^ ^ patches of their main plateau a couple of darkish spots which we _ ^ a^y» camp and boring. The higher foothills shot up between five an _ YiW&f3^ forming a range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more ^ P«ks beyond mem. At length Ropes—the student who had rel^VC ^ JJ Ae controls-began to bead downward toward the left-hand dar* j^red ^ tt^^ it as tW camp. As he did ^ m-«~l the worlds so. McTighe sent out the last uncensore of c^^^otir expedition. . ftbe ' *** the brief and unsatisfying bulletins at * AT of our - of the tragedy we found and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole Lake party by the fnghtful wind of the preceding day, or of the night before that Eleven known dead, young Gedney missing. People pardoned our hazy |ack of details through realisation of the shock the sad event must have caused us and believed us when we explained that the mangling action of the wind had rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable for transportation outside. Indeed, I flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress, utter bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the truth in any specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in what we dared not tell—what I would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from nameless terrors. It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. The storm, with its fury of madly driven ice-particles, must have been beyond anything our expedition had encountered before. One aeroplane shelter—all, it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate state—was nearly pulverised; and the der-nck 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 *e six insanely bu«* ^ ^ years dead. , do not recall whether I ****** " p Mountains of Madness £t rHt »751. checking up the canine bodies we found one dog raissing. We m ^ % ** I'' X 1 3ntrh 1 h3Ve ***of it at all m The pri^'P3' thl"Ss 1 have been keePln8 back relate to the bodies and to cer ■n subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of ra-Lale to the apparent chaos. At the nme I tried to keep the men's minds off those 00ints; for * ^ so much slmPler~so ™*h more normal-to lay everything to ^ outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake's party. From the look of things, that daemon mountain wind must have been enough to drive any man mad . midst of this centre of all earthly mystery and desolation. The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies—men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each case come from strangulation or laceration. The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for the state of their ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within. It had been set some distance from the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean organisms, but die precaution seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in that monstrous wind behind flimsy walls of insufficient height they must have stampeded—whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle, increasing odour emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say. Those specimens, of course, had been covered with a tent-cloth; yet the low antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended to make the strangely sound and tough tissues of tile things relax and expand. Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth from over them, and jostled them about in such a way that their more pungent olfactory qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity. But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I had better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last—though with a categorical statement of opinion, based on the first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and myself, that the then missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found. I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was the same with d°gs and men. All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed, as by a careful butcher; and aro"nd them was a strange sprinkling of salt-taken from the ravaged provtsion-*es« on the planes—which conjured up the most horrible associations. The **I had occurred in one of the crude aeroplane shelters from which the plane ad heen dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced all tracks couU spiled any plausible theory. Scattered bits of clothing, roughly slashed H. P. 752 • ■ ECR t „ incision-subjects, hinted no clues. It is useless tQ bri h£ ^cTrtatn faint snow-prints in one shielded COrner S half-impte^100 inipression did not concern human prints -.. . e rn from n,.;J uecause tnat ijnf --- t-i"iis at aii , enclosure^ ^ ^ rf fossi] prints whidl poQr ^ ^ Du, ^ Cl"\™XtleprIceding weeks. One had to be careful of one's lmagi^ ^ ^C-hado^mountamsofmadnes, As I ha« indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missi ~Ua1*d*» Ti/** liar! miQCprl tmr, A___ . [H When we came on that ternble shelter we had mused two dogs and ^ e;, I fairly unharmed dissecting tent, whtch we entered after investigati J* «* str0us graves, had somethingto reveal. It was not as Lake had left it, for" **• ered parts of the primal monstrosity had been removed from the impt0vi C" STw had already realised that one of the six imperfect and bsan2 must and around that laboratory table were strown other things, and it did nottafc' ° Inaeea, wc ------j - -«*m things we had foimd-the one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful od0u_ represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake had tried to analy: for us to guess that those things were the carefully though oddly and inexpert dissected parts of one man and one dog. I shall spare the feelings of survivor!/ omitting mention of the man's identity. Lake's anatomical instruments were miss rag, but there were evidences of their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it we found a curious litter of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men, and the canine parts with the other 35 dogs Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory table, and on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated books scattered near it, we were much too bewildered to speculate. This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were equally perplexing The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain instruments, illustrated technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches and batteries, food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like, was utterly beyond sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink-blots on certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien fumbling and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices both at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed m abhor this oddly disordered machinery. Then, too, there was the upsetting of e larder, the disappearance of certain staples, and the jarringly comical heap of aneans pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely places. The eZr0 rr^ matches> «^d ^minor alxTlb t6 * M tent-cloths «» suits which we found lying 2 »h^& concdvaMy due to clumsy effort J I*** adaptation. The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies, and A* the JvlOUNTAINS OF MADNESS 751 „7V burial of the damaged Archaean specimens, were all nf a ■ f ^carefully photographed aU the main evidences of l^^Z iXour — -—of me P Our fhst act after finding the bodies m the shelter was to photograph and npen the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help noting the resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their clusters of Juped dots, to poor Lake's descriptions of the strange greenish soapstones; and ^hen we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the great mineral pile we found the likeness very close indeed. The whole general formation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably suggestive of the starfish-head of the Archaean entities; and we agreed that the suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitised minds of Lake's overwrought parry. Our own first sight of the actual buried entities formed a horrible moment, and sent the imaginations of Pabodie and myself back to some of the shocking primal myths we had read and heard. We all agreed that the mere sight and continued presence of the things must have cooperated with the oppressive polar solitude and daemon mountain wind in driving Lake's party mad. For madness—centring in Gedney as the only possible surviving agent—was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken utterance was concerned; though I will not be so naive as to deny that each of us may have harboured wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate completely. Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive aeroplane 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 ** our day of terror and bafflement; but not without a tentative plan for one or fore range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with aerial camera and ^gist's outfit, beginning the following morning. It was decided that Danforth I try it first, and wc awaked at 7 a.m. intending an early trip; though heavy . 754 brief bulletin to the outside world—dela 6^A tyed at ^mentioned in our 111 nearly nine °'f**~> &t non-committal story we told th, I have ahead)'«p^ ^ ^ six£een hours Iater ft fe _ a"d "'^rr^unt by filling » *e^merciful blanks with hints duty to ampi^ rrans.montane world—hints of the reveW- now , the hidden trans- .eallysawntneu^ ^ colkpse. , wish he WQuld finally driven Dan ^ ^ hg a]one saw__even though & ^ y trarik word about the thing ^ ^ ^ last straw ^ ^ ^ nervous delusio ^ i ti t ^< iHn is tn reneat Ms W<4i^. . 3 is: but f-ff^against that. All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed whi" ainsi Lj."- till wnisnp chriekin" as the plane soared back through the wind ■* ™o-»P»* rf eld.r horrors ,„ wha I &loM *»» last word. r ___uw*«f -m-it-h the inner antarrtii-_... i enou; *mi ienot from word. It me P""" -b~ lgh to keep others from meddling with the inner antarctic—or at least f| prying too deeplv beneath the surface of that ultimate waste of forbidden *' and unhuman, aeon-cursed desolation—the responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immensurable evils will not be mine. Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight and checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass in the range lay somewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about 23,000 or 24,000 feet above sea-level. For this point, then, we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked on our flight of discovery. The camp itself, on foothills which sprang from a high continental plateau, was some 12,000 feet in altitude; hence the actual height increase necessary was not so vast as it might seem. Nevertheless we were acutely conscious of the rarefied air and intense cold as we rose; for on account of visibility conditions we had to leave the cabin windows open. We were dressed, of course, in our heaviest furs. As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the line of crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and more the curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. The ancient and wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all of Lake's bulletins, and proved that these hoary pinnacles had been towering up in exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in earth's history-?erhaps over fifty million years. How much higher they had once been, 't was futile to guess; but everything about this strange region pointed to obscure ^spheric influences unfavourable to change, and calculated to retard the J* dtmatic processes of rock disintegration ^uT£ mo7a,nside of re^lar cubes'rampart5' t£> fasanat«i and disturbed us most. I studied them with a B&T ut: mountains of madness 755 took aerial photographs whilst Danfonh drove; and « rimes ^ ^ 1 control-though my av.atton knowledge was purely an amateur-J™ Jet him use the binoculars. We could easily see that much of ^ J^** 1 was a ligl-h Archaean quartztte, unlike any formation visible over broad 3of thc gener "I la? at ftregulari* *» «™ -a ~y t0 extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted. 30 he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough material had saved them from obliteration. Many parts, especially those closest to the slopes, seemed identical in substance with the surrounding rock surface. The whole arrangement io0ked like the ruins of Machu Picchu in the Andes, or the primal foundation-walls 01 Kish as dug up by the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and I obtained that occasional impression of separate Cyclopean blocks, which Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll. How to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange regularities;—like the famous Giants' Causeway in Ireland—but this stupendous range, despite Lake's original suspicion of smoking cones, was above all else non-volcanic in evident structure. The curious cave-mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most abundant, presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity of outline. They were, as Lake's bulletin had said, often approximately square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand. Their numerousness and wide distribution were remarkable, and suggested that the whole region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata. Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within the caverns, but we saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites. Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the slight cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual patterns. Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the camp, he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities. We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along toward the relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally looked down «the snow and ice of the land route, wondering whether we could have attempted *e trip with the simpler equipment of earlier days. Somewhat to our surprise we *W that the terrain was far from difficult as such things go; and that despite the Masses and other bad spots it would not have been likely to deter the sledges of H. P- Lo 756 Shackle, or a, Amundsen Some of the glac.ers appeared fc * ** IS passes with -usual contmmty, and upon reaching 0ur 'TfmatLase formed no excepnon. ^ we found tnat expectancy as we prepared to round the crest .„ ■ out over an untr ^ ^ ^ ^ gh tte —a-"he touch of evil mystery, these b ner ^ 2!« beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summitS) ^ ^hly subde and attenuated matter not to be explained tn hteral word, ^ was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association, thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking fa 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 whisding or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave-mouths. There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions. We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of 23,570 feet according to the aneroid; and had left the region of clinging snow definitely below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers—but with those provocative cubes, ramparts, and echoing cave-mouths to add a portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and the dream-like. Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the one mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart exactly cm top. It seemed to be half-lost in a queer antarctic haze; such a haze, perhaps, as had been responsible for Lake's early notion of volcanism. The pass loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a sky fretted with swirling vapours and lighted by the low polar sun-the sky of that mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed. A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth aoj .unable to speak except m shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that rac^ ^ugh the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, e*W eioouent r|s (>). phrases sprang to our hps as we looked dizzily down .u the UnbjeUeVabl^sp^* 1 thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently hinted since my first sight of this dead antarctic world—of the daemomac p|;ltt,u Lena of the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men of the Himalayas, of «V d V .... ... "nakniir Manuscripts with their pre-human implications, 01 the Cthulhu cult, of the Ne nomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the wors^ than formless star-spawn associated with that semi-entity. For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low gradual foothills which separated it from the acatal 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 die outer sides of the mountains. The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from 10 to 150 feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone—blocks in many cases as large as 4 x 6 x 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-pom' ground plan roughly suggested modern fortifications. The builders had made cot stant and expert use of the principle of the arch, and domes had probably exis in the city's heyday. ^ ofn The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surfa^J^ which the towers projected was strown with fallen blocks and immemon ^ Where the glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of piles, and noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges which connected the i ^ ^ towers at varying distances above the ground. On the exposed walls we . tect the scaned places where other and higher bridges of the same sort ha I ^ Closer inspection revealed coundess largish windows; some of which we* {fi with shutters of a petrified material originally wood, though most gape ^ ^ a sinister and menacing fashion. Many of the ruins, of course, w«* roo Al Mountains oi Madness 751) th lllieveti though wind-rounded upper edges; whilst others, of a more sharply gonicd or pyramidal model or else protected by higher surrounding structures. oreservL-c d intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and pitting. With the |-,e|d-ghiss we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural decorations in horizontal bands—decorations including those curious groups of dots whose presence 00 the ancient soapstones now assumed a vastly larger significance. in many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice-sheet deeply riven from various geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn down to the very level of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from the plateau's interior to a cleft in the foothills about a mile to the left of the pass we had traversed, was wholly free from buildings; and probably represented, we concluded, the course of some great river which in Tertiary times—millions of years ago—had poured through the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly, tiiis was above alt a region of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human penetration. Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dasedness at viewing this monstrous survival from aeons we had thought pre-human, I can only wonder that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium which we did. Of course we knew that something—chronology, scientific theory, or our own consciousness—was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the plane, observe many tilings 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 buih and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what relation to the general world of lts Urne or of other times so unique a concentration of life could have had. por this place could he no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary nu=Ws and centre of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth's history * Dse outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most obscure and distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long pala""6 ^ human race we know had shambled out of apedom. Here sprawled a Corn°gean megaloPo!is compared with which the fabled Adantis and Lemuria, °f ^?°ri0ln ^ Uzuldaroum, and Olathoe in the land of Lomar are recent things ku J ay~~nt>t even of yesterday; a megalopolis ranking with such whispered pre-Wasphemies as Valusia. R'lveh. Th in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City —ramies as Valusia, R'lyeh, lb in i J Arabia Deserta. As we flew above that tangle of stark titan towers my tic alsnat,°n SOmethneS escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms of fantas-MldP OC!ations-^ven weaving links betwixt this lost world and some of my own ajns concerning the mad horror at the camp. . 760 H. P. LovE f-I The plane's fuel-tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had been Q. filled- hence we now had to exert caution in our explorations. Even So J we covered an enormous extent of ground—or rather, air-rafter to a level where the wind became virtually negligible. There seemed to be the mountain-range, or to the length of the frightful stone city which k^i •sdtoben0li .' which , er foothills. Fifty miles of flight in each direction shewed no ma to ered iti the labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpse-like fa^**® eternal ice. There were, though, some highly absorbing diversifications;^* the carvings on the canyon where that broad river had once pierced the'foolr and approached its sinking-place in the great range. The headlands at the streak entrance had been boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons; and something ab0ut a! ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing sernj remembrances in both Danforth and me. We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares-and noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill rose, it was generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling stone edifice; but there were at least rwo 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 foothiUs near our navigable pass, there grounding the plane and preparing to do some exploration on foot. Thoug these gradual slopes were partly covered with a scattering of ruins, low flying ■» disclosed an ample number of possible landing-places. Selecting that nearest to pass, smce our next flight would be across the great range and back to camp, **s" ceeded about 12:30 p.m. in coming down on a smooth, hard snowfield wholly d**. <~7 ^ weU adaP*d to a swift and favourable takeoff later on. $o It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking ' W a tune and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this level; he we merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged, and that the v*» P3 at „ Mountains of Madness THE iyl 761 chanism were guarded against the cold. For our foot journey we dis-Jd the heaviest of our flying furs, and took with us a small outfit consisting of g£ the me can .t compass, hand camera, light provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper, ■ f's hammer and chisel, specimen-bags, coil of climbing rope, and power- ful electric tore. hes 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, Ice drawings and topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens from some m slope outcropping, or mountain cave. Fortunately we had a supply of extra 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 rrate This had been brought in case we found some cave system with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the usual rock-chipping method of trail-blazing. Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously. True, we had become visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks; yet the prospect of actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years ago—before any known race of men could have existed—was none the less awesome and potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality. Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual; both Danforth and I found ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to our lot. It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet. For this latter we headed; and when at last we were able actually to touch its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we reit that we had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally closed to our species. This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps 300 feet from point to point, was °uih of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6x8 feet in surface. «e was a row of arched loopholes or windows about four feet wide and five 6et *"gb; spaced quite symmetrically along the points of the star and at its inner ^g!es, and with the bottoms about four feet from the glaciated surface. Looking wr°Ugh ^ese, we could see that the masonry was fully five feet thick, that there "6 n° Potions remaining within, and that there were traces of banded carvings low35^156^ °n ^interior wal!s;facts we had indeed guessed before, when flying °Ver ^is rampart and others like it. Though lower parts must have originally 762 H. P. Lov existed, all traces of such things were now wholly obscured by trle de ice and snow at this point. We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to de epi*yetof rly effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciatedflj ^ orientation flights had indicated that many buildings in the city proper ■ -choked, and that we might perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading dow to Off the true ground level if we entered those structures still roofed at the top. Bef we left the rampart we photographed it carefully, and studied its mortarless Cycl" pean masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished that Pabodie were preset for his engineering knowledge might have helped us guess how such titanic blocks could have been handled in that unbelievably remote age when the city and its outskirts were built up. The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind shrieking vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the background, was something whose smallest details will always remain engraved on my mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any human beings but Danforth and me conceive such optical effects. Between us and the churning vapours of the west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers; its outre and incredible forms impressing us afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid stone, and were it not for the photographs I would still doubt that such a thing could be. The general type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart we had examined; but the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban manifestations were past all description. Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its infinite bizarrene, 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 clisprofwrtion; shafts with odd bulbous enlargements; broken columns in cunous 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"sh^ and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that connected the crazily spnnU structures at various heights. Of orderly streets there seemed to be none, the o J broad open swath being a mile to the left, where the ancient river had doub flowed through the town into the mountains. Our field-glasses shewed the external horizontal bands of nearly effaced ^ tures and dot-groups to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine what m must once have looked like-^ven though most of the roofs and t^-=° j necessarily perished. As a whole, i, had been a complex tangle of twisted J* ^ alleys; all of them deep canyons, and some little better than tunnels bee*"*, overhanging masonry or overarching bridges. Now, outspread below i* * AT THE Mountains of Madness 763 a dream-phantasy against a westward mist through whose northern end the £ reddish antarctic sun of early afternoon was struggling to shine; and when for ^ rnent that sun encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into 3 orary shadow, the effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to j^ict. Even the faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind in the great mountain asses behind us took on a wilder note of purposeful malignity. The last stage of ^ ascent to the town was unusually steep and abrupt, and a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led us to think that an artificial terrace had once existed there. Under the glaciation, we believed, there must be a flight of steps or its equivalent. When at last we plunged into the labyrinthine town itself, clambering over fallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp_which I resented all the more because 1 could not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid survival from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his imagination, too; for in one place—where a debris-littered alley turned a sharp corner—he insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like; whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subde 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 »e mechanically carried out our programme of chipping specimens from all the different rock types represented in the masonry. We wished a rather full set in order to draw better conclusions regarding the age of the place. Nothing in the Peat outer walls seemed to date from later than the Jurassic and Comanchian Periods, nor was any piece of stone in the entire place of a greater recency than c Pliocene age. In stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a death which had re'gned at least 500,000 years, and in all probability even longer. ^ As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped 5Qa11 available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities. ro°o77ere ^ °Ur reach> whilst °thers led °n,y int° ice-ch°ked niinS 33 0p! barren "» the rampart on the hill. One, though spacious and inviting, °n a seemingly bottomless abyss without visible means of descent. Now 764 H. P. L °vec*ast at the mountains of madness 765 and then we had a chance to study the petrified wood of a surviving shutter,,,,,, 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. ln the placing of these shutters—whose edges shewed the former presence of queer and long-vanished hinges—usage seemed to be varied; some being on the outer and some on the inner side of the deep embrasures. They seemed to have become wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of their former and probably metallic fixtures and fastenings. After a time we came across a row of windows—in the bulges of a colossal five-ridged cone of undamaged apex—which led into a vast, well-preserved room with stone flooring; but these were too high in the room to permit of descent without a rope. We had a rope with us, but did not wish to bother with this twenty-foot drop unless obliged to—especially in this thin plateau air where great demands were made upon the heart action. This enormous room was probably a hall or concourse of some son, and our electric torches shewed bold, distinct, and potentially startling sculptures arranged round the walls in broad, horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips of conventional arabesques. We took careful note of this spot, planning to enter here unless a more easily gained interior were encountered. Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an archway about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end of an aerial « ff which had spanned an alley about five feet above the present level of glaciaoo^ These archways, of course, were flush with upper-story floors; and in this ca . one of the floors still existed. The building thus accessible was a series 01 gular terraces on our left facing westward. That across the alley, where BW ^ archway yawned, was a decrepit cylinder with no windows and with a ca bulge about ten feet above the aperture. It was totally dark inside, and the arc seemed to open on a well of illimitable emptiness. ., eaSy, Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building dou yet for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the lpng^*6*^ fte5h For though we had penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery, it vxP** resolution to carry us actually inside a complete and survfving building ° ^ u, bus elder world whose nature was becoming more and more hideously P> 0 * rtt;pr the ruw1' d seem* uamre was Becoming more and more i"">-— - jbjv In the end, however, we made the plunge; and scrambled up over ^ ^ ,o gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate slabs, a*1 ' form the oudet of , long, high corridor with sculptured walls. Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and 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, to- ge our rear, 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 pre- ther with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain-range between the towers in had been enough to prevent our losing our way; but from now on, the pared to use them as economically as safety would allow. This method would prob- ably 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 moTe tedious and retarding method of rock-chipping. Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible to guess without a trial. The close and frequent connexion of the different buildings made it likely that we might cross from one to another on bridges underneath the ice except where impeded by local collapses and geologic rifts, for very little glaciation seemed to have entered the massive constructions. Almost all the areas of transparent ice had revealed the submerged windows as tightly shuttered, as if the town had been left in that uniform state until the glacial sheet came to crystallise the lower part for all succeeding rime. Indeed, one gained a curious impression that this place had been deliberately closed and deserted in some dim, bygone aeon, rather than overwhelmed by any sudden calamity or even gradual decay. Had the coming of Ae ice been foreseen, and had a nameless population left en masse to seek a less ^omed abode? The precise physiographic conditions attending the formation of e ice-sheet at this point would have to wait for later solution. It had not, very am v> been a grinding drive. Perhaps the pressure of accumulated snows had " resP°nsible; and perhaps some flood from the river, or from the bursting of now anC1Cnt Siacial dam in the great range, had helped to create the special state ow observable. Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with Wls place. rea lisu I T *ould fle ■*.Wand ' mbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our ^at ^onst"1^8 inS^e ^at cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry; c°unted e 'a'r °^ 6^er secrets which now echoed for the first time, after un-of the h„ -,C S't0 t*le tread °f human feet. This is especially true because so much horrible A "^ral ca . rama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent Pr0ving th ^ ^asJui8ht photographs of those carvings will do much toward truth of what we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had . 766 not a larger film supply with us. As it was, we made crude notebook sketch ■ i salient features after all our films were used up. certain ess The building which we had entered was one of great size and eIaborat and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geo7 past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving curio^T irregular differences in floor levels, characterised the entire arrangement; ^ ^ should certainly have been lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn paper y behind us. We decided to explore the more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of some 100 feet, to where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the polar sky. Ascent was effected over the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps or inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of stairs. The rooms we encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. It might be safe to say that their general average was about 30 x 30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height; though many larger apartments existed. After thoroughly examining the upper regions and the glacial level we descended story by story into the submerged part, where indeed we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular building. The Cyclopean massiveness and giganrirism 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 loon realised from what the carvings revealed that this monstrous city was many million years old. We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous balancing and adjustment of the va»t rock masses, though the function of the arch was clearly much relied on. The rooms we visited were wholly bare of all p°r table contents, a circumstance which sustained our belief in the city's deliber^ desertion. The prime decorative feature was the almost universal system of mur^ sculpture; which tended to ran in continuous horizontal bands three feet *1(le ^ arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width given ^ » geometrical arabesques. There were exceptions to this rule of attU>l^a^ but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often, however, a series of - ^ cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of dots would be sunk along on the arabesque bands. . ^ The technique, we soon Mw, was mature, accomplished, and *e%ch^erf evoked to the highest degree of civilised mastery; though utterly alien m ^ detail to any know,, „t tradition ^ the human race. In delicacy of e**u of Madness 767 quantity iflV us m THE Mountains lpCUre 1 have ever seen could approach it. The minutest details of elaborate fetation, or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing vividness despite l^bold scale of the carvings; whilst the conventional designs were marvels of 'Jlful intricacy. The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical prin-5. jes anfJ were made up of obscurely symmetrica] curves and angles based on the ^inritv of five- The pictorial bands followed a highly formalised tradition, and olved a peculiar treatment of perspective; but had an artistic force that moved profoundly notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods. Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross-section yjth the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists. The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines whose depth on unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot-groups appeared—evidently as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language and alphabet—the depression of the smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps a half-inch more. The pictorial bands were in counter-sunk low relief, their background being depressed about two inches from the original wall surface. In some specimens marks of a former colouration could be detected, though for the most part the untold aeons had disintegrated and banished any pigments which may have been applied. The more one studied the marvellous technique the more one admired the things. Beneath their strict conventionalisation one could grasp the minute and accurate observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves served to symbolise and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated. We felt, too, that besides these recognisable excellences there were others lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions. Certain touches here and there gave vague hints of 'atent symbols and stimuli which another mental and emotional background, and a u er or different sensory equipment, might have made of profound and poignant 'ignificance to us. The subject-matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the van-e epoch of their creation, and contained a large proportion of evident history. _ 15 this abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal race—a chance circumstance ^e?tinK. through coincidence, miraculously in our favour—which made the togtaT "° aWesomely informative to us, and which caused us to place their pho-do fap y transcription above all other considerations. In certain rooms the nU"ant arr*ngement was varied by the presence of maps, astronomical charts, id 8 H- P. Lov the [vlOL'n i'ains op Madness 769 .li,,] »nd other scientific designs on an enlarged scale—these things gh^ a ^ tembJecorroborarion to what we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dudT hinting at what the whole revealed. I can only hope that my account will not - ^ a curiosity greater than sane caurion on the part of those who believe m J^*8 would be tragic t any were to be allured to that realm of death and horror by 2l very warning meant to discourage them. • e Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-f doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks_elahora T 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 biiarxe 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 Kke—of a sort suggested in many of the carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been inlaid with green soapstone or other riles, mostly fatten now. Floors were also paved with such dies, though plain stonework predominated. As I have said, all furniture and other moveables were absent; but the sculptures gave a dear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these torob-Bke, echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the floors were generally thick with denims, fitter, and debris; but farther down this condition decreased. In some of the lower chandlers and corridors there was little more than gritty dust or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncanny air of newly swept immacu-Iweness. Of course, where rife or collapses had occurred, the lower levels were as littered as the upper ones. A central court—as in other structures we had seefl from the mi—saved the inner regions from total darkness; so that we *#**JJT w use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying sculptured j* tails. Bdow the ice-cap, however, the twdight deepened; and in many parts ° tangled ground level there was an approach to absolute blackness. ^ ^ To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings ts ^ P»««ted this aeon-suW maze of unhuman masonry one must B*"*^ bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were e ^ to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements ^ Z™*™ horror at the camp, and the revelations all too feoed by the terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment we r~ A 1 set š nnl; t0 claim Danforth arid 1 had not independently suspected before, though perleť um k (llliy n brief study to give us the hideous truth—a truth which it would be g, section id carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it ,ly n > clu yt 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 inhibited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man's ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropica! steppes L)f Europe and Asia. We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted—each to himself_that the omnipresence of the five-pointed motif meant only some cultural or religious exaltation of the Archaean natural object which had so patendy embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of Rome the irolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribes some chosen totem-animal. But this lone refuge was now stripped from us, and we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking realisation which die reader of these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in black and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary. The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objects—but the builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well-nigh a thousand million years... rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells,,. rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals °f the fiendish elder myths which things like the Prtakotic Manuscripts and the N*ovnomkon afftightedly hint about. They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young—the beings whose substance an ?** ev°lution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had never And to think that only the day before Danforth and I had actually looked ut>on fragments of their millenniallv fossilised substance... and that poor Lake and his P^rty had seen their complete outlines. | of course impossible for me to relate in proper order the stages by which Picked up what we know of that monstrous chapter of pre-human life. After m 7* ^ of the certain revelation we had to pause a while to recuperate, *as fully three o'clock before we got started on our actual tour of system-^^rch- The sculptures in the building we entered were of relatively hue ^"-Perhaps two million years ago—as checked up by geological, biological, comical features; and embodied an art which would be called decadent 770 H. P. Lov in comparison with that of specimens we found in older buildings after cro bridges under the glacial sheet. One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed * go back forty or possibly even fifty million years—to the lower Eocene or upp ° Cretaceous—and contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything el« 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 retrain from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a madman. Of course, the infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale—representing the pre-terrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets, and in other galaxies, and in other universes—can readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge when they see the photographs I shall publish. Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fraction of any connected story, nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages of that story in their proper order. Some of the vast rooms were independent units so far as their designs were concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss below even the ancient ground level—a cavern perhaps 200 feet square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly been an educational centre of some sort. There were many provoking repetitions of the same material in different rooms and buildings; since certain chapters of experience, and certain summaries or phases of racial history, had evii dendy been favourites with different decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, thougj variant versions of the same theme proved useful in settling debatable points a filling in gaps. f I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our dispos- ed ourse, we even now have only the barest oudine; and much of that was ob** ter °" f™m,a ^ of the photographs and sketches we made. It may be » effect of d* later study-me revived memories and vague impressions acWg ?* ^ *** S6nSiti~ 2 final supposed *«* «te S0Un* °f Danfo^ Present breakdown. But it had to be; for we coul n issue our warning inteUigendy without the fullest possible informal, ^ nuance of that warning is a prime necessity. Certain lingering l*f£-*r ur^nown antarctic world of disordered time and alien natural law make >t Ave mat further exploration be discouraged. at thb Mountains oh Madness 771 VII. THE full STORY, SO FAR AS DECIPHERED, will SHORTLY APPEAR IN AN of-ficial bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only the salient high lights in a formless, rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space—their coming, and the coming of many other alien entities such as at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering. They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast membraneous wings—thus oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. They had lived under die sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of energy. Evidendy their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed man's today, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage ol mechanised life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness of organisation and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to live on a high plane without the more specialised fruits of artificial manufacture, and even without garments except for occasional protection against the elements. It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that diey 'rst 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 manured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hyp-^t,C inr^uence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of ^.COmrauri,ty- These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred thar13*^^ al>0Ut aS "sh°gg°tris" in his frightful Necronomicon, though even ^ mac* ^rab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of °n th chewed a certain alkaloidal herb. When the star-headed Old Ones sh0 1S PlanCt had synthesised their simple food forms and bred a good supply of and^0*4'they allowed other cell-groups to develop into other forms of animal trouble^1*16 f°r SUndry PurPoses; extirpating any whose presence became 'lesome. di^ the aid of the shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift pro-rJghtS> Ae "ntf. low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing ES* °f St0ne not ^ which later rose on land. Indeed, the highly Pbb|e Old Ones had lived much on land in other parts of the universe, and 772 KAFf probably retained many traditions of land construction. As we studied the a . tecmre of all these sculptured palaeogean cities, including that whose aeon d corridors we were even then traversing, we were impressed by a curious dence which we have not yet tried to explain, even to ourselves. The tops^"?' buildings, which in the actual city around us had of course been weathered 5 shapeless ruins ages ago, were clearly displayed in the bas-reliefs; and shewecj clusters of needle-like spires, delicate finials on certain cone and pyramid Vast apexes, was ex- and tiers of thin, horizontal scalloped discs capping cylindrical shafts. This acdy what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous mirage, cast by a dead ' whence such skyline features had been absent for thousands and tens of thousand^ of years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes across the unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached poor Lake's ill-fated camp. Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them migrated to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their Five main head tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the usual way—the writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths though they used a curious phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their vision with obscure special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their heads—senses which rendered all the Old Ones partly independent of light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and writing had changed curiously during the descent, embodying certain apparently chemical coating processes—probably to secure phosphorescence—which the bas-reliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming-—using the lateral crinoid arms—and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles containing the pseudo-feet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fan-like folding wings. On land they locally used the pseudo-feet, but now and then flew to great heights or over long distances with their wings. The many slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate, flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coordination; ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations. The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressures of the deepest sea-bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few seen* to die at all except by violence, and their burial-places were very limited- J fact that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed P*» mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and t cuperanon necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings means of spores-like vegetable pteridophytes as Lake had suspected-but to their prodigious toughness and longevity, and consequent lack of AT ■THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS 773 eeds, they did not encourage the large-scale development of new prothalli except ^henthey had new regions to colonise. The young matured swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any standard we can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring m 0f 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 vasdy preferred organic and especially animal food. They ate uncooked marine life under the sea, but cooked their viands on land. They hunted game and raised meat herds—slaughtering with sharp weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resisted all ordinary temperatures marvellously; and in their natural state could live in water down to freezing. When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however—nearly a million years ago— the land dwellers had to resort to special measures including artificial heating; until at last the deadly cold appears to have driven them back into the sea. For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legend said, they had absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating, breathing, or heat conditions; but by the time of the great cold they had lost track of the method. In any case they could not have prolonged the artificial state indefinitely without harm. Being non-pairing and semi-vegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological basis for the family phase of mammal life; but seemed to organise targe households on the principles of comfortable space-utility and—as we deduced from the pictured occupations and diversions of co-dwellers—congenial mental association. In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the centre of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. Light-lng, 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, ^airs, 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 cer-in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There was tensive commerce, both local and between different cities; certain small, flat ^0Unters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably the smaller of the Tahn°US greenish soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such currency. J0ugb the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock-raising „1Sted- Mini"g and a limited amount of manufacturing were also practiced. Travel * ver7 frequent, but permanent migration seemed relatively rare except for the • 774 - H- P. Lovec vast colonising movements by which the race expanded. For personal 10 Raft no external aid was used; since in land, air, and water movement alike th Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for speed. Loads, how COr"onor, « Old ever va nery were drawn by beasts of burden—shoggoths under the sea, and a curious of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence. These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life-forms_animal vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aerial—were the products of unguided evol^ don acting on life-cells made by the Old Ones but escaping beyond their radiu of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked because they had n come in conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to palaeontology. The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes and convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of miraculous. Though few or none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean age, there was no interruption in their civilisation or in the transmission of their records. Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean, and it is likely that they came not long after the matter forming the moon was wrenched from the neighbouring South Pacific. According to one of the sculptured maps, the whole globe was then under water, with stone cities scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as aeons passed. Another map shews a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole, where it is evident that some of the beings made experimental settlements though their main centres were transferred to the nearest sea-bottom. Later maps, which display this land mass as cracking and drifting, and sending certain detached pans 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 bega"' 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 pro -ably corresponding to the fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu—soon beg* filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a monstrous war which for* time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea—a colossal blow in view of « increasing land settlements. Later peace was made, and the new lands were #* to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands. ^* land cities were founded-the greatest of them in the antarctic, for this regi at THE Fountains of Madness 775 ,st arrival was sacred. From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the lt nf the Old Ones' civilisation, and all the discoverable cities built there bv the (jtnu»»u "i— - ---------—"» ■ ■ taking with them the frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, "tliat the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet except for one shadowy fear ^out which they did not like to speak. At a rather later age their cities dotted all jte land and water areas of the globe—hence the recommendation in my coming ori0graph that some archaeologist make systematic borings with Pabodie's type of apparatus in certain widely separated regions. The steady trend down the ages was from water to land; a movement encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths upon which successful sea-life depended. With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost; so that the Old Ones had to depend on the moulding of forms already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem. They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestion of die Old Ones, and had modelled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modelling powers were sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a semi-stable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it. Sculptured images of these shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing. They *ete 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 ^here. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume; throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech * im'tation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion. Tney seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the Permian age, perhaps 150 million years ago, when a veritable war of re-subjugation *"* Waged upon them by the marine Old Ones. Pictures of this war, and of the headJ«s, slime-coated fashion in which the shoggoths typically left their slain held a marvellously fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of "mold ages. The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbance the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory. There-, tet sculptures shewed a -od jn which Shoggoths were tamed and broken y arni«l Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west were tamed by cow- . 776 • boys. Though during the rebellion the shoggoths had shewn an ability to |-of water, this transition was not encouraged; since their usefulness on land'^ °Ut hardly have been commensurate with the trouble of their management „ it ____:____*U,. r\U r\~™ .--»f___1___i. ■ . During the Jurassic age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a n invasion from outer space—this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean create from a planet identifiable as the remote and recently discovered Pluto; creatures undoubtedly the same as those figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, for the first time since their terrene advent, to sally forth again into the planetary ether; but despite all traditional preparations found it no longer possible to leave the earth's atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel had been, it was now definitely lost to the race. In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands, though they were powerless to disturb those in the sea. Little by little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original antarctic habitat was beginning. It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely different from that which we know than was the substance of the Old Ones. They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally come from even remoter gulfs of cosmic space. The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital properties, were strictly material, and must have had their absolute origin within the known space-time continuum; whereas the first sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath. All this, of course, assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are not pure mythology. Concen ably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework to account for occasional defeats; since historical interest and pride obviously formed their psychological element. It is significant that their annals failed to mennon _ advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering figure persistendy in certain obscure legends. , ^ The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeal startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain ^ ^ existing science will require revision, while in other cases its bold deductio^ ^ magnificently confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, ^""^h Joly that all the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass ^ cracked from centrifogal force and drifted apart over a technically ^sC°^eS 0f surface—an hypothesis suggested by such things as the complementary ^ Africa and South America, and the way the great mountain chains are ro shoved up—receives striking support from this uncanny source. at THE M ountains of Madness 777 Maps evi dently shewing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or ars ag0 displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate Af-^hom the once continuous realms of Europe (then the Valusia of hellish primal -and most rica u—~ | end), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic continent. Other charts Jgnificandy one in connexion with the founding fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around us—shewed all the present continents well differentiated. And in the latest discoverable specimen—dating perhaps from the Pliocene age—the approximate world of today appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe through Greenland, and of South America with the antarctic continent through Graham Land. In the Carboniferous map the whole globe—ocean floor and rifted land mass alike—bore symbols of the Old Ones' vast stone cities, but in the later charts the gradual recession toward the antarctic became very plain. The final Pliocene specimen shewed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip of South America, nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge and interest in the northern world, save for a study of coast-lines probably made during long exploration flights on those fan-like membraneous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones. Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea-bottom, and other natural causes was a matter of common record; and it was curious to observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on. The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last general centre of the race; built early m 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 ^ot of all, where reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea-bottom. ,tne new city—-many of whose features we could recognise in the sculptures, but 1Ich stretched fully an hundred miles along the mountain-range in each direction yond the farthest limits of our aerial survey—there were reputed to be preserved cenain sacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city, which were thrust Pt0 light after long epochs in the course of the general crumpling of strata. \ VIIL liar]KALLY' danforth and i studied with especial interest and a pecu- "n Which ^erS0na^ sense °f awe everything pertaining to the immediate district «n the t Were- °f this local material there was naturally a vast abundance; and very ]ate ^ e Sr°und level of the city we were lucky enough to find a house of ate Wnose walls, though somewhat damaged by a neighbouring rift, con- 778 H- 1». l.„ Ml tuned sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the story of the . beyond the period of the Pliocene mup whenw we derived uur \m ^m,,.^" mUc|i of the pre-human world, This wan the hist place wr examined in der til i n*Ws we found ihere gave us ti fresh immediate objective. W»M Certainly, we were in uiie of the strangest, weirdest, imd most tmib| die corners of earth's globe. Of all existing lands it was infinitely the m»»i • *" and the conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed k.. .1 * lilt' I'iKl j nightmare plateau of leng which even the mad author of the Mvni,,,,,,. . reluctant to discuss. The great mountain chain was tremendously |<>ng .s,Wils a low range at Luitpold Land on the coast of Weddell Sea and virtually er .""^^ * \ljqin-Cl ills, entire continent. The really high part stretched in a mighty arc from about I • ' 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70u, E, Longitude 1ISJ, with iis n..,""'"* < ^.^incdvc side toward our camp and its seaward end in the region of that long, ice-locked whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mawson at the Antarctic Circle Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of Nature seemed disturbingly close at hand. 1 have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the sculp tures forbid me to say that they are eardi's highest. That grim honour is beyond doubt reserved for something which half the sculptures hesitated to record at all whilst others approached it with obvious repugnance and trepidation. It seems that there was one part of the ancient land—the first part that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon and the Old Ones had seeped down from the stars—which had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil. Cities built there had crumbled before their time, and had been found suddenly deserted. Then when the first great earth-buckling had convulsed the region in the Comanchian age, a frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and chaos—and earth had received her loftiest and most terrible mountains. If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have been much over 40,000 feet high—-radically vaster than even the shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended, it appeared, from about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 100°—less than 300 miles away from the dead city, so that we would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim western distance had it not been for that vague opalescent haze. Their northern end must likewise be visible from the long Antarctic Circle coast-line at Queen Mary Land. Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to those mountains; but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyon ■ No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the emotions conveyed m *e 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 77»» h„„ able i'1 '•""I <™«b llu.se hills. I .,,„ M Hu.pljta, ^ M "'!! and &»* JS ' "M<' ('°.'!!" h"*h "0W ,hc M»»««W sculptor', m lightning paused meaningfully now and then ai each of the brooding K| thai an unexplained glow shone from on,- of .how terrible pinnacle* all the long l,l,lar niKlu- Tlwre ni:'y b«" a vcrv rt"ul «d very monstrous mean-c old I'nakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste. H„i the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less namelessly ,,| Soon after lltt founding of the city the great mountain-ranue became he seat of 'be principal temples, and many carvings shewed what grotesque and lititastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only the curiously clinging ■ubes uiid rumparis. 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 aeroplane survey. Its position in differ-•* dryings of the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stages of the region's age-long, aeon-dead history; so that we were *fc to sketch a hasty but careful map of the salient features—squares, important Gildings, and the like—for guidance in further explorations. We could soon re-™nstn,ct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was a million or ten million or lfty million years ago, for the sculptures told us exactly what the buildings and *°«ntains and squares and suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary station had looked like. It must have had a marvellous and mystic beauty, and as . 780 . R L0VECRAF, I thought of it I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with wk the city's inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness anc| twilight had choked and weighed on my spirit. Yet according to certain catvjZ the denizens of that city had themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror for there was a sombre and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shewn in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object—never allowed to j 6 pear 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 shonly 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 terras of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at a distance of about 500,000 years from the present, but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork; but it is quite likely that the decadent sculptures were made consider ably less than a million years ago, and that the actual desertion of the city complete long before the conventional opening of the Pleistocene—500,000 ye^ ago—as reckoned in terms of the earth's whole surface. hete In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation every*' ^ and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old Ones. Heating dev,ce^ctjve shewn in the houses, and winter travellers were represented as muffled in pr0 fabrics. Then we saw a series of cartouches (the continuous band a"3"86""^^-frequently interrupted in these late carvings) depicting a constandy growing ^ tion to the nearest refuges of greater warmth—some fleeing to cities ^ off the far-away coast, and some clambering down through networks of '"^ caverns in the hollow hills to the neighbouring black abyss of subterrene wa ai- T-HE M OUNTAtNS OF MADNESS 781 In the en d it seems to have been the neighbouring abyss which received the atest „ colonisation. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional sacredness ^this especial region; but may have been more conclusively determined by the ° ortunities it gave for continuing the use of the great temples on the honey-^nibed mountains, and for retaining the vast land city as a place of summer resi-jence and base of communication with various mines. The linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by means of several gradings and improvements along the connecting routes, including the chiselling of numerous direct tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the black abyss—sharply down-pointing runnels whose mouths we carefully drew, according to our most thoughtful estimates, on the guide map we were compiling. It was obvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a reasonable exploring distance of where we were; both being on the mountainward edge of the city, one less than a quarter-mile toward the ancient river-course, and the other perhaps twice that distance in the opposite direction. The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places; but the Old Ones built their new city under water—no doubt because of its greater certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears to have been very great, so that the earth's internal heat could ensure its habitability for an indefinite period. The beings seem to have had no trouble in adapting themselves to part-time—and eventually, of course, whole-time—residence under water; since they had never allowed their gill systems to atrophy. There were many sculptures which shewed how they had always frequendy 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 eP'c 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 0 die honeycombed mountains, and employing expert workers from the nearest anne citY to perform the construction according to the best methods. These ^°rkers brought with them all that was necessary to establish the new venture— for ^°*"tissue fr°m which to breed stone-lifters and subsequent beasts of burden nr^ » Cavern °ty, and other protoplasmic matter to mould into phosphorescent r^msfor%htingpurposes ^cture 3 migllty meTropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea; its archi-little d mUCh °f ^ city above' and itS workmanship displaying relatively 0Petadoa because of the precise mathematical element inherent in building gence "j T^ newlv bred shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular intelli-> ^d were represented as taking and executing orders with marvellous quick- H p r . 782 . -LLovfic^ „ess They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking their W .on of musical piping over a wide range, if poor Lakes dissection had £^ aright-and to work more from spoken commands than from hyp„otic su "*N as in earlier times. They were, however, kept in admirable control. The Sj* rescent organisms supplied light with vast effectiveness, and doubtless a tone! 7 the loss of the familiar polar auroras of the outer-world night. tot Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain decaden The Old Ones seemed to realise this falling off themselves; and in many anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially blocks of ancient carving from their land city, just as the emperor, in a "* of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of their finest an to give his new By&fljg? capital greater splendours than its own people could create. That the transfer of sculptured blocks had not been more extensive, was doubtless owing to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned. By the time total abandon, ment did occur—and it surely must have occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced—the Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art—or had ceased to recognise the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation; though ail the best separate statues, like other moveBbles, had been taken away. The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this story were, as I have said, the latest we could find in our limited search. They left us with a picture of the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land city in summer and the sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading with the sea-bottom cities off the antarctic coast By this rime the ultimate doom of the land city must have been recognised, for the sculptures shewed many signs of the cold's malign encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer. The saurian livestock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were standing it none too well. To keep on with the work of the uppet 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 da The great river was now lifeless, and the upper sea had lost most o its denizens except the seals and whales. All the birds had flown away, save only e great, grotesque penguins. What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had sea-cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal * ness? Had the snbterranean waters frozen at last? To what fate had the oc bottom cities of the outer world been delivered? Had any of the Old Ones ■ north ahead of the creeping ice-cap? Existing geology shews no trace * THE fountains of Madness 781 V^l? Could one be sure of what might or might not linger even to this day in the Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land world of •'"he liglltless and unPlumbed zby^5 of earth's deepest waters? Those things inJ Jungly been able to withstand any amount of pressure—and men of the ^ have fished up curious objects at times. And has the killer-whale theory really >ed the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a generation explain . . , agobyBorchgrevmgk? The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for their eologic 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 eity and indeed the cavern itself, had no existence. They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around them, and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean. And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens—especially about the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake's hideously ravaged camp. There was something abnormal about that whole business—the strange things we had tried so hard to lay to somebody's madness—those frightful graves—the amount and nature of the missing material—Gedney—the unearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities, and the queeT vital freaks the sculptures now shewed the race to have____Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last few hours, and were prepared to believe and keep silent about many appalling and incredible secrets of primal Nature. IX. T have said that our study of the decadent sculptures bhought about a change in our immediate objective. This of course had to do with the chiselled avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had not known before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse. From the evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply descending walk of about a mile through ^ther of the neighbouring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the diz2y sunless c i Is above the great abyss; down whose side adequate paths, improved by the Old lones>led 10 the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this faki-^ fe^lf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of resistance once we ew of the thing—yet we realised we must begin the quest at once if we expected 10 delude it on our present flight lt was now 8 P,M. aru! we nad n0, enough battery replacements to let our 784 H. P. Lov EcKAFT torches burn on forever. We had done so much of our studying and coPylngbe, the glacial level that our battery supply had had at least five hours of near, * °* tinuous use; and despite the special dry cell formula would obviously be g^?' only about four more—though by keeping one torch unused, except for eSpecjalj ' interesting or difficult places, we might manage to eke out a safe margin be"3 J that. It would not do to be without a light in diese Cyclopean catacombs herT in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further mural deciphering Qf course we intended to revisit the place for days and perhaps weeks of uuensn study and photography—curiosity having long ago got the better of horror—but just now we must hasten. Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited and we were reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it; but we did let one large notebook go. If worst came to worst, we could resort to rock-chipping—and of course it would be possible, even in case of really lost direction, to work up to full daylight by one channel or anodier if granted sufficient time for plentiful trial and error. So at last we set off eagerly in the indicated direction of the nearest tunnel. According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired tunnel-mouth could not be much more than a quarter-mile from where we stood; the intervening space shewing solid-looking buildings quite likely to be penetrable still at a sub-glacial level. The opening itself would be in the basement—on the angle nearest the foothills—of a vast five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial nature, which we tried to identify from our aerial 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 die latter case the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would have to try the next nearest one—the one less than a mile to the north. The intervening river-course prevented our trying any of the more southerly tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if bo* of the neighbouring ones were choked it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly one choice. -about a mile beyond our second As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map compass—traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and clambering ^ again, encountering choked doorways and piles of debris, hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate stretches, taking false leads an tracing our way (in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), once ma while striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight P0"^ or tnckled down-we were repeatedly tantalised by the sculptured walls ak<"* THE route. M ountains of madness 785 Many must have told tales of immense historical importance, and only ospect of later visits reconciled us to the need of passing them by. As it was, ^lowed down once in a while and turned on our second torch. If we had had ** fi!niS We would certainly have paused briefly to photograph certain bas-m°efs but time-consuming hand copying was clearly out of the question. r i come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate, or to hint ther than state, is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the rest in order justify my course in discouraging further exploration. We had wormed our way close to the computed site of the tunnel's mouth—having crossed a secondary bridge to what seemed plainly the tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor especially rich in decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of late workmanship—when, about 8:30 P.m., Danforth's keen young nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual. If we had had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned before. At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-pure air, but after a few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely. Let me try to state the thing without flinching. There was an odour—and that odour was vaguely, subdy, 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 increas-mS'y Uttered floor and heaps of debris. Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many half-jhoked arches leading to chambers and corridors on the ground level. It did not °°k quite as it ought after countless thousands of years of desertion, and when we piously tfca^ on more ]ight w saw ^ a Mnd of seemed to have been *te'y tracked through it. The irregular nature of the litter precluded any definite rk, but in the smoother places there were suggestions of the dragging of heavy ^eCts- °n« we thought there was a hint of parallel tracks, as if of runners. This *hat made us pause again. 11 'was during that pause that we caught-^imultaneously this time—me 786 H- P. Lov en nighted burial-place of the aeons, hence could not doubt any longer the existen nameless conditions—present or at least recent—just ahead. Yet in the end other odour ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and , mote . odour—less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this place "^l known circumstances... unless, of course, Gedney. ... For the odour plain and familiar one of common petrol—every-day gasoline. as *e Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists, \t/ t now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled i6 lnto this ceof •- we did let sheer burning cunosity—or anxiety—or auto-hypnotism—or vatrue & , ■ i . . b "oughts of responsibility toward Gedney—or what not—drive us on. Danforth whisper again of the print he thought he had seen at the alley-turning in the ruins above and of the faint musical piping—potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake's dissection report despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks—which he thought he had shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left—of what had disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivable—a wild trip across the monstrous mountains and a descent into the unknown primal masonry— But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite. We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet, until very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease. We had been all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from the ait Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not even going to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened. The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carven walls of the blocked corridor in which we stood, shewed several doorways in various states of obstrucnon, and from one of them the gasoline odour quite submerging that other hint o odour—came with especial distinctness. As we looked more steadily, we saw tjtfj beyond a doubt there had been a slight and recent clearing away of debris {l0"t_^ particular opening. Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the avenue toward it was now plainly manifest. I do not think anyone will wonder we watted an appreciable time before making any further motion. And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first irnpress»« one of anticlimax. For amidst the tittered expanse of that sculptured eW[Z - - object AT ins1 787 perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet—there remained no recent the MoUNTAINS of marjnf.ss cantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively, though in vain, for a far-[kr doorway- In another moment, however, Danforth's sharp vision had descried ,ace where the floor debris had been disturbed; and we turned on both torches 0 strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually simple and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because of what it implied. It was a rough levelling of the debris, upon which several small objects lay carelessly scattered, 3nd at one corner of which a considerable amount of gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odour even at this extreme super-plateau altitude. In other words, it could not be other than a son of camp—a camp made by questing beings who like us had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss. Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was concerned, all from Lake's camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches, three illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with its pictorial and instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur and tent-cloth, a used electric battery with circular of directions, a folder that came with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was all bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on them we felt we had come to the worst. We had found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet the effect of the sight down there in the pre-human vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much to bear. A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave-mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches—varying in their accuracy or lack of it—which oudined the neighbouring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly represented place outside our previous route—a place we identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aerial 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 "ever have done was to execute those sketches in a strange and assured technique ptaps superior, despite haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings t0m wh'ch they were taken—the characteristic and unmistakable technique of the 0id Ones themselves in the dead city's heyday. f There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee 0t °1r lives after that; since our conclusions were now—notwimstanding their 788 H. vho ve l ra» deb wildness-completely fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention tc I: deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their hat"'1 less--^vjjii^^'-"-—— ' —*"un i _ have read my account as far as this. Perhaps we were mad—for ha. said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I cai, s something of the same spirit—albeit in a less extreme form—in the men ^ Set us. Half-paralysed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end. Of course we did not mean to face that—or those—which We knew had been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this time have found the other neighbouring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within to whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate gulf—the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the north seeking another. They were, we remem bered, partly independent of light. Looking hack 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 1 will not deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage-point. Probably we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though there was interposed a new goal in the form of that great circular place shewn on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at once recognised it as a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in the very earliest carvings, but appearing only as a prodigious round aperture from above. Something about the impress!veness of its rendering, even in these hasty diagrams, made us think that its sub-glacial levels must still form a feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible age according to the sculptures in which it figured-—being indeed among the first things built in the city. Its carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover, it might form a good present link with the upper world—a shorter route than the one we were so carefully blazing, and pr ably that by which those others had descended. At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches—which vecraft of crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths of its circumfL by the massive curving walls of a line of higher rums. According to the Scul^ the original tower had stood in the centre of an immense circular plaza. and been perhaps 500 or 600 feet high, with tiers of horizontal discs near the top, aJ row of needle-like spires along the upper rim. Most of the masonry had obvious 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 ra 6 shewed sad bartering; whilst the choking was such that all the archways at the bottom seemed to have been recently half-cleared. It took us only a moment to conclude that diis was indeed the route by which those others had descended, and that this would be the logical route for our own ascent despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere. The tower's mouth was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane than was the great terraced building we had entered, and any further sub-glacial exploration we might make on this trip would lie in this general region. Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips—even after all we had seen and guessed. Then as we picked our way cautiously over the debris of the great floor, there came a sight which for the time excluded all other matters. It was the neady huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the ramp's lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto been screened from our view. There they were—the three sledges missing from Lake's camp— shaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and debris, as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and contained things memorably familiar enough—the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provision rins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with boob, 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 oudtnes 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, perfecdy preserved, patched with adhesive plaster where some wounds around the neck had occurred, and wrapped with patent care to prevent further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog- A1 the Mountains of Madness 791 M x. FOB any people will probably judge us callous as well as map ^ thinking about the northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our so scovery: and I am not prepared to say that we would have immediately revived ch thoughts but for a specific circumstance which broke in upon us and set up SlChole new train of speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Ged-ly and were standing in a kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally " ached our consciousness—the first sounds we had heard since descending out [{ 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 0f 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 rhe camp horror—it would have had a kind of hellish congru-iry with the aeon-dead region around us. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As it was, however, the noise shattered all our profoundly seated adjustments—all our tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste as utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life as the sterile disc of the moon. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarised by our sea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief—it was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin. The muffled sound floated from sub-glacial recesses nearly opposite to the corridor whence we had come—regions manifesdy 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 °nly one conclusion; hence our first thought was to verify the objective reality of 6 sound. It was, indeed, repeated; and seemed at times to come from more than one throat. Seeking its source, we entered an archway from which much debris had een cleared; resuming our trail-blazing—with an added paper-supply taken with u?T% rePugnar'ce from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledges—when we flight behind. Som^S *e glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned whoseC"nous dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a sort guin 6 ■eSCnption would be only too superfluous. The course indicated by the pen-ihe CneS Was Precisely what our map and compass prescribed as an approach to 016 n0rtherly tunnel-mouth, and we were glad to find that a bridgeless thor- 792 ou to we se> earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their«. J^ toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution concerning in the great circular place, must have planned to return after their scouti ■... ^ JLm^ mm ghfare on the ground and basement levels seemed open. The tunnel ac the chart, ought to stan from the basement of a large pyramidal i seemed vaguely to recall from our aerial survey as remarkably Wel] p **h** Along our path the single torch shewed a customary profusion of carving l^' did not pause to examine any of these. ' »1** Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our miSV^ f i____-j.. .... Tknro „»1,™ ^„__i____• , .. 'torn suPplies trip as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing ti&fr-yj six feet high, yet we seemed to realise at once that it was not one of those othe/ 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 diey 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 CMti 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 * at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest Jn<8fferen^efS the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any passing party of those o should have startled them. Was it possible that those others had taken some^t gressive action or tried to increase their meat supply? We doubted iifalB** pungent odour which the dogs had hated could cause an equal antipathy >" with the a 1 the mountains of madness 793 eS_an amicable relationship which must have survived in the abyss below as °Tas any of the Old Ones remained. Regretting—in a flareup of the old spirit of -that we could not photograph these anomalous creatures, we shortly uft theJS t°tbeir scIuawking and Pushed on toward ±e ahyss whose openness was ow so positively proved to us, and whose exact direction occasional penguin [racks made clear. Hot long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly -ulptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel-moudi at last. We had passed two more penguins, and heard others immediately ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp involuntarily—a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep underground; fully an hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with low archways opening around all parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning cavernously with a black arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the vault to a height of nearly fifteen feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss. In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively though deca-dently carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, a few albino penguins waddled—aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The black runnel yawned indefinitely off at a steep descending grade, its aperture adorned with grotesquely chiselled jambs and lintel. From that cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air and perhaps even a suspicion of vapour proceeded; and we wondered what living entities other than penguins the limitless void below, and the contiguous honeycombings of the land and the titan mountains, might conceal. We wondered, too, whether the trace of mountain-top smoke at first suspected by poor Lake, as well as the odd haze we had ourselves perceived around the rampart-crowned peak, might not be caused by the tortuous-channelled rising of some such vapour from the unfathomed regions of earth's core. Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was—-at least at the start—about fifteen feet each way; sides, floor, and arched roof composed of the usual mega-lithic masonry. The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of conventional designs in a late, decadent style; and all the construction and carving were marvellously well preserved. The floor was quite clear, except for a slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks of those others. The farther one advanced, the warmer it became; so that we were soon unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered whether there were any actually igneous manifestations * 0w, and whether the waters of that sunless sea were hot. After a short distance e masonry gave place to solid rock, though the tunnel kept the same propor-ftor>s 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 scieno penguins; since their ancestors had obviously lived on excellent terms 794 H. P. L OVE ft AT xhe Mountains of Madness 795 none 0f th, the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in our diagrams; such as to complicate the problem of our return, and all of them welcome j sible refuges in case we met unwelcome entities on their way back from the l^' The nameless scent of such things was very distinct. Doubdess h Was ^ J foolish to venture into that tunnel under the known conditions, but the lUre unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspect—indeed, it was ■ " such a lure which had brought us to this unearthly polar waste in the first p] ace saw several penguins as we passed along, and speculated on the distance we would have to traverse. The carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the abyss, but our previous wanderings had shewn us that matters of scale were not wholly to be depended on. After about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly accentuated and we kept very careful track of the various lateral openings we passed. There was no visible vapour as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air. The temperature was rapidly ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a careless heap of material shudderingly familiar to us. It was composed of furs and tent-cloth taken from Lake's camp, and we did not pause to study the bizarre forms into which the fabrics had been slashed. Slighdy beyond this point we noticed a decided increase in the size and number of the side-galleries, and concluded that the densely honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills must now have been reached. The nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another and scarcely less offensive odour—of what nature we could not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterrene fungi. Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the carvings had not prepared us—a broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-looking elliptical cavern with a level floor; some 75 feet long and 50 broad, and with many immense side-passages leading away into cryptical darkness. Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torches suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several w * between adjacent honeycombings. The walls were rough, and the high va ¥ roof was thick with stalactites; but the solid rock floor had been smoothed cm and was free from all debris, detritus, or even dust to a positively abnormal tfte^ Except for the avenue through which we had come, this was true of the fio°rS^ all the great galleries opening off from it; and the singularity of the «ndJB0^1 such as to set us vainly puzzling. The curious new foetor which had supply ^ the nameless scent was excessively pungent here; so much so that it deStI"y|)il0Sl trace of the other. Something about this whole place, with its polished and ^ ^ glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any monstrous things we had previously encountered. The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the larger proportion of penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion as to the right course amidst this plethora of equally great cave-mouths. Nevertheless we resolved to resume our paper trail-blazing if any further complexity should develop; for dust tracks, of course, could no longer be expected. Upon resuming our direct progress we cast a beam of torchlight over the runnel walls— and stopped short in amazement at the supremely radical change which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage. We realised, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones' sculp-mre at the time of the tunnelling; and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now, in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanation—a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it. This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail. It was counter-sunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections, but the height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface. Danforth had the idea that it was a second carving- -a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In nature it was wholly decorative and conventional; and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly fallowing the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet. seeming more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique—an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognise as ^e °'d Ones' art; and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the Ungainly Palrnyrene sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner. That others had recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presence of a used torch att«yon the floor in front of one of the most characteristic designs. Slnce we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we resumed °"r advance after a cursory look; though frequently casting beams over the walls SCe lf anv further decorative changes developed. Nothing of the sort was per-m^m°ugh the carvings were in places rather sparse because of the numerous uiQU l °f SRlootu-floored lateral tunnels. We saw and heard fewer penguins, but vCt j ^ Caught a vaEue suspicion of an infinitely distant chorus of them some- strom *ormily honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single antasfc, daemoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith-clouds, of what lay back .«06- H' P. Lovecraft of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shUnne(j feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the prev ** stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognised ntfj* the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake s camp the day before; but j!„ • •11 7^^h wi? so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still. He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things abont "the black pit," "the carven rim," "the proto-shoggoths," "the windowless soli^ with five dimensions," "the nameless cylinder," "the elder pharos," "Yog-Sothoth; "the primal white jelly," "the colour out of space," "the wings," "the eyes in fa^ ness," "the moon-ladder," "the original, the eternal, the undying," and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library. The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that its swirls of ice-dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest—and of course Danforth did not hint any of those specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on Ins 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 wotd of all too obvious source: "Tek&li-li! Tekeli-lir J