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<j! de* -red paths would bring to light materials of a sort j,itJ S aJ°ng pfevj > 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 <juick. starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us.
We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season—or longer, if absolutely necessary—would permit, operating mostly in the mountain-ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by aeroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material; especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variery of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life-history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth's past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming vegetable and aiumal life of which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter of common information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy, and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we should enlarge the aperture by blasting in «** to get specimens of suitable size and condition.
Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the uPP« T 01 "T WCre W U <° «P<*ed or nearly exposed land surface
*aeineviably bring siopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thick**
1 „d "* *■ ^ level, We could not afford to waste drilling *J*
toed**
on
m C°nSi<teiab!e «f mere glaaation, though Pabodie had worl
A 1
THE
M
ountains of Madness
725
for
sinking copper electrodes in thick clusters of boti
....."vungs and melting off
a ft areas of tee with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan-^ h we could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition such as *h that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow despite ours"~"        j naVe issued since our return from the antarctic.
ThTpubl* kru,ws o( the Mtskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless rts to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later articles ?Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four men from the University—Pabodie, ke of the biology department, Atwood of the physics department (also a me-^rologist), and I representing geology and having nominal command—besides te0een assistants; seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled me-^anics- Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aeroplane pilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships—wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam—were fully manned. The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions, financed the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough despite the absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were loaded. We were marvellously well-equipped for our specific purposes, and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp construction we profited by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made our own expedition—ample though it was—so little noticed by the world at large.
As die newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbour on September 2, 1930; taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains-J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic—both veteran whalers in antarctic waters. As *e left the inhabited world behind the sun sank lower and lower in the north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62° South Latitude *e s'ghted our first icebergs—table-like objects with vertical sides—and just kfcre reaching the Antarctic Circle, which we crossed on October 20 with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with field ice. The lng temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the roP'«, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigours to come. On many occasons
H. p
0heric effects enchanted me vastly; these indud
vlV1d m rage- me the
raents0f m b which was formnateiy neither
pX-gS oPen water * S^e ^ East Lo^^ \1 Uk of October 26 a strong land bhnk appeared on the soj'5 • 0„ f we all     a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, 10% ^ b,
luntX chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead ^ had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and fe ^ o( frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty range ™ ^ Ross ^ it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail d0*n . *» coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurd , * at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9'. 0 ^
The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern ^ noon or the sail lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its"" ^ reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bi ^ exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept raging intermitted gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague ^ gestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over"" wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necroncmicm of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred i was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.
On the seventh of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mb. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low, white line of the great ice barrier; rising perpendicularly to a height of 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The *onac peak towered up some 12,700 feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese jwmof ,he^ fc ^ ^ ^ g^-Uke brigl«°f
fiL 7T' 10,900 ^ ™ lltitude' «W* n™ » a volcano. Puffs of an*
^Erehus came intennittendy, and one of the graduate assistants fcriDW **« Mow named Danforth-pomtecl ou, what looked lite lava on the
A'1
jvIountains of Madness
■ 727
parking that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoui)tedl ,
S P   of Poc 'S image when he wrote seven years later 0f y been ^
source
"—the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole-That groan as they roil down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole."
nanforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe t was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe'* only long story— tde disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on first treading antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano's slope was only a provisional one; headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham. We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras both ordinary and aerial, aeroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless outfits (besides those in the planes) capable of communicating with the Arkham s targe outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be likely to visit. The ship's outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey press reports to the Arkham Adveraser'% powerful wireless station on Kingspon Head, Mass. We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible we would winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonii: north before the freezing of the ice for another summer's supplies.
I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie'% apparatus accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our provisional test of the small ice-melting «P»ipment; our perilous ascent of the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge aeroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The kalth of our land party—twenty men and 55 Alaskan sledge dogs-was remark-
i f course we had so far encountered no really destructive h able, though ot c    PoT ^e most part, the thermometer varied betwe,,, Vra.
and
aur
T TXve, and     experience with Now England winter, 20° or 25 360 'rt Thebarrier camp was semi-permanent, wd<fe*n*>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 <A«*
at
XTenantless world of aeon-long utterly tei     _ .____u„ ...
731
nine
dogs, since it is unwise to be at any time without possible transportation
death.
in an
Lake's sub-expedition into the unknown, as everyone will recall sent out its 0VI1 reports from the short-wave transmitters on the planes; these being simul taneously picked up by our apparatus at the southern base and by the Mkam at McMurdo Sound, whence they were relayed to the outside world on wave-lengths up to fifty metres. The start was made January 22 at 4 a.m.; and the first wireless message we received came only two hours later, when Lake spoke of descending and starting a small-scale ice-melting and bore at a point some 300 miles away from us. Six hours after that a second and very excited message told of the frantic, beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft had been sunk and blasted; culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with several markings approximately like the one which had caused the original puzzlement.
Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight in the teeth of a raw and piercing gale; and when 1 despatched a message of protest against further hazards, Lake replied curtly diat his new specimens made any hazard worth taking. 1 saw that his excitement had reached the point of mutiny, and that I could do nothing to check this headlong risk of the whole expedition's success; but it was appalling to think of his plunging deeper and deeper into that treacherous and sinister white immensity of tempests and unfathomed mysteries which stretched off for some 1500 miles to the half-known, half-suspected coastline of Queen Mary and Knox Lands.
Then, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited message from Lake's moving plane which almost reversed my sentiments and made me *»h I had accompanied the party.
"10:05 p.m. On the wing. After snowstorm, have spied mountain-range ahead higher than any hitherto seen. May equal Himalayas allowing for height of plateau. Probable Latitude 76° 15', Longitude 113° 10' E. Reaches far as can see to right and left. Suspicion of two smoking cones. All peaks bJack and bare of snow. Gale blowing off them impedes navigation."
Afer that Pabodie, the men, and I hung breathlessly over the receiver. Thought thls titanic mountain rampart 700 miles away inflamed our deepest sense of ad-we wjoiced that our expedition, if not ourselves personally, had been s ,scoverers. In half an hour Lake called us again.
"MouJton's plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but nobody hurt lnd Perhaps can repair. Shall transfer essentials to other three for return
. 732
pre-ar in to
H- P-LovECRA
fi rthet moves if necessary, but no more heavy plane travel needed jUst now Mounts surpass anything in imaginat.on. Am go.ng up SCOutIng ^Carroll's plane, with all weigh, out. You can t .magine anything like L Highest peaks must go over 35,000 feet. Everest out of the mnnmg Atwood to work out height with theodohte while Carroll and I g0 up_ Probably wrong about cones, for formations look stratified. Possibly pre. Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in. Queer skyline effects—regul8 sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks. Whole thing marvellous i ted-gold light of low sun. Like land of mystery in a dream or gateway t forbidden world of untrodden wonder. Wish you were here to study."
Though it was technically sleeping-time, not one of us listeners thought for a moment of retiring. It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo Sound, where the supply cache and the Arkham were also getting the messages; for Capt. Douglas gave out a call congratulating everybody on the important find, and Sherman, the cache operator, seconded his sentiments. We were sorry, of course, about the damaged aeroplane; but hoped it could be easily mended. Then, at 11 p.m., came another call from Lake.
"Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don't dare try really tall peaks in present weather, but shall later. Frightful work climbing, and hard going at this altitude, but worth it. Great range fairly solid, hence can't get any glimpses beyond. Main summits exceed Himalayas, and very queer. Range looks like pre-Cambrian slate, with plain signs of many other upheaved strata. Was wrong about volcanism. Goes farther in either direction than we can see. Swept clear of snow above about 21,000 feet. Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly vertical stdes, and rectangular lines of low vertical ramparts, like the old Asian casdes chnging to steep mountains in Roerich's paintings. Impressive jm distance. Flew close to some, and Carroll thought they were formed JTj but that is probably weathering. Most edges
for mUHon  /0Unded °*    * ^td t0 m and *****
loured Jvi!T ?™' uPPer Parts> 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, die 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 ^ Ernstem 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 wtth Archaeozoic ceUs ^ ^      jalised n0t later than
jusand rruUion years ago, when planet was young and recendy nrn^-
' TOWB» md how developn
pment took place."
"Later,
er. .
^"y stru Pnmitive mammal r 3gments °f ,arg« ^nd and marine ^'maj of ^ "0t Mutable8' ,OGaJ wounds 01 *
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 barrel with five bulging ridges in place of staves. Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at equator in middle of these ridges. In furrows between ridges are curious growths. Combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans. 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 at a distance from them."
H ******
«,|-»P M- ***** Dyer, P«»*die. Douglas. Matter .„ high^ «C transcendent-importance. ***** must relay to HMd Surion « once. Strang barrel growth H the Archaean thing that lett prints in Mills. Boudrea... and Fowler discover cluster of thir-^ mw « underground point forty feet from aperture. Mtxed with cunouslv nwxldl and configured soapstone fragments smaller than one previously found—star-shaped but no marks of breakage except at some of the points. Of organic specimens, eight apparently perfect, with all appendages. Have brought all to surface, leading off dogs to distance. They cannot stand the things. Give close attention to description and repeat back for accuracy. Papers must get this right.
"Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot five-ridged barrel torso 3.5 teet central diameter, 1 foot end diameters. Dark grey, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membraneous wings of same colour, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, of lighter grey, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges, are five systems of light grey flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over 3 feet. Like 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 tbree-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colours. Head thick and puffy, 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 lowist membrane rolls h b *"* ^ *" SPhericaJ expansion where yd-^«Mly an eye. Five J!tV* handii"g to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, 0f statfsn.snaped . m? longer reddish tubes start from inner angles UP°n PresSUre 0pen JT 6nd ,n *>c-Iike swellings of same colour which 7 lü,e<l m sharp wh!    3Ped °rifices 2 inches maximum
eSandP°«"tScIin P^ntS0 «arfish.head found folded tight]ydown; T Vast ^«ghness.   °   h°US "«* and torso. Flexibility surpÄ
eadt «^nlTrS0.t0,18h bm di^^ilarly functioning «=°"f
8°*«- exist. Bulbous Hght-grey pseudo-neck, ^ ^
A1
thk Mountains; of Madness
739
suggestions, holds greenish hve-pointed starfish-arrangement. Tough muscular arms 4 teet 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 '""estone action. No more found so far, but will resume search later. Job to get f0Urteen huge spearriens to camp without dogs, which bark furi°uSly and can>t be trU5ted near Aem. With nine S^rd the dogs^we ought to manage the three sledges fairly wdL though *ind b       w.....       .K_______Z*mmic*km 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 ate> any rest. Wish I had 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. Con° the Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the cave. Now will drkhaj^***' repeat description? " P ease
The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this renon 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^f"^ 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 told of the completely successful transportation of the fourteen great specimens to the camp. It had been a hard pull, for the things were surprisingly heavy; but nine men had accomplished it very neady. 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 tmighness. Lake was puzzled as to how he might mate the requisite incisions without violence destructive enough to upset all the struc-2^™**" ** loofa"g ^ He had, it is true, seven more perfect specimen but these were too few to use up recklessly unless the cave might later yield «■ bmited «pp|v. Accordingly he removed the specimen and dragged in one
it ^ tamma °{ ** ^h-arrangernents at both ends, was b*W crushed and party darupt^ along one of the great torso furrows.
the Mountains of Madness
AT 1 • 741 .
Bruits, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocative indeed- Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the litde that was achieved left us all awed and bewil-dered. Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no prod-act 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 internal inspection brought up so many vegetable evidences that Lake was left hopelessly at sea. It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base. Cursorily, one would say that its respiratory apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide; and there were odd evidences of air-storage chambers and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two other fully developed breathing-systems— gills and pores. Clearly, it was amphibian and probably adapted to long airless hibernation-periods as well. Vocal organs seemed present in connexion with the main respiratory system, but they presented anomalies beyond immediate solution. Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable-utterance, seemed barely conceivable; but musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly probable. The muscular system was almost preternaturally developed.
The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast. Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing had a set of ganglial centres and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialised development. Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced; and there were signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry cilia of the head, involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism. Probably it had more than five senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from any existing analogy. It must, Lake thought, have been a creature of keen sensitiveness and delicately Wuons in its primal world; much like the ants and bees of today. It reproduced
742
H. P. L
ovE
l,ke the vegetable cryptogams, especially the ptendophytes; having spo^ 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-fourths 0f ? 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 quickly rejected this too facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the older fossils. If anything, the later contours shewed decadence rather than higher evolution. The size of the pseudo-feet had decreased, and the whole morphology seemed coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs just examined held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether, little could be said to have been solved; and Lake fell back on mythology for a provisional name—jocosely dubbing his finds "The Elder Ones."
At about 2:30 a.m., having decided to postpone further work and get a little rest, he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged from the laboratory tent, and studied the intact specimens with renewed interest. The ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a trifle, so that the head-points and tubes of two or three shewed signs of unfolding; but Lake did not believe there was any danger of immediate decomposition in the almost sub-zero air. He &> however, move all the undissected specimens closer together and throw a spare M over them in order r '
keep
their nossihl £° °ff the direct *olar rays. That would also help to walls whiTl 31      9imaaM distan« ^d behind the higher and higher
^hich an ' ----'^wmwuhuiiq we mgn" •—   ~   , uejr
He Jr^lr:.        ^ ™e haS™S * ^ blo^
* — to Jfc J* **» -mers of the tent-cloth with heavy ^ ** 10 d^ver somf !* *" ^ gale> for *e *an Ldd*
^tsrctic winds were S6Vere blas^ Early apprehensions about ^
taker,tobankthetPnf<reVIVed' ^ under Atwood's supervision PrecaUt,10* 0n ^ ^-^1, and crude aeroplane shelters with
A'
the
743
THE Mountains of Madness
^ mountainward side. These latter shelters begun with hard snow blocks during odd moments, were by no means as high as they should have been; and Lake fTa detached all hands from other tasks to work on them. y 6 It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us all t0 share the rest period his outfit would take when the shelter walls were a Httle higher. He held some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether, and repeated his praise of the really marvellous drills that had helped him make his discovery. Atwood also sent greetings and praises. I gave Lake a warm word of congratulation, owning up that he was right about the western trip; and we all agreed to get in touch by wireless at ten in the morning. If the gale was then over, Lake would send a plane for the party at my base. Just before retiring I despatched a final message to the Arkham with instructions about toning down the day's news for the outside world, since the full details seemed radical enough to rouse a wave of incredulity until further substantiated.
III.
None of us, i imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morn-ing; for both the excitement of Lake's discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were against such a thing. So savage was the blast, even where we were, that we could not help wondering how much worse it was at Lake's camp, direcdy under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it. McTighe was awake at ten o'clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed, but some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the westward seemed to prevent communication. we did, however, get the Arkham, and Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly trying to reach Lake. He had not known about the wind, for very little was Mowing at McMurdo Sound despite its persistent rage where we were.
Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at intervals b« invariably without results. About noon a positive frenzy of wind stampeded °ut of the west, causing us to fear for the safety of our camp; but it eventually died **». with only a moderate relapse at 2 p.m. After three o'clock k was very quiet ** -e redoubled our efforts to get Lake. Reflecting that he had four plane, ***** with an excellent shortLve outfit, we could not imagine any^rdinary
a°cident capgjjj      T"**** """*" "—
silence     ^ CdpPling a11 his wireless
equipment at once. Nevertheless the ^ave had in ^C°nt'nued; and when we thought of the delirious force the wind must % six o' T ^°Ca^ty we c°uld not help making the most direful conjectures, station        °Ur fearS had become
intense and definite, and after a wireless eat,"oti, Doug'as and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps toward invesri-
h afroplane, which we had left at the McMuido Sound supply cache
744
H. P. L
Oy
ja and rwo sailors, was in good shape and ready tor instailt u
SmL, by wireless and ordered him to ,om me with the plane and the two £ m «the southern base as quickly as possible; the a,r condlttons being appareiB| highly favourable. We then talked over the personnel of the coming investigate party; and decided that we would include all hands, together with the sledge and dogs which 1 had kept with me. Even so great a load would not be too much f0rone of the huge planes built to our especial orders for heavy machinery transportation. At intervals I still tried to reach Lake with the wireless, but all to no purpose.
Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30; and reported a quiet flight from several points on the wing. They arrived at our base at midnight, and all hands at once discussed the next move. It was risky business sailing over the antarctic in a single aeroplane without any line of bases, but no one drew back from what seemed like the plainest necessity. We turned in at rwo o'clock for a brief rest after some preliminary loading of the plane, but were up again in four hours to finish the loading and packing.
At 7:15 a.m., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under McTighe's pilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food supply, and other items including the plane's wireless outfit. The atmosphere was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature; and we anticipated very little trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude designated by Lake as the site of his camp. Our apprehensions were over what we might find, or fail to find, at the end of our journey; for silence continued to answer all calls despatched to the camp.
Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age o fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses throug its accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature's laws. Thenceforward the ,en of us-but the student Danforth and myself above all others—were to W 1 h'de0Usly "*"W *°rld of lurking horrors which nothing can erase fi«»£
«, and which we would refrain fr could. The newspapers have printed the
bulletins we sent
from the moving P^j
codd Th ^ W0UW refrain fr™ sharing ^th mankind in general if
MM?eWSPapCrS W printed *•bullerini
'"-stop course, our two battles with treacherous upper-*" _
where Lake had sunk his mid-journey ^
days before, and
and Byrd as rolling in the wind across the endless ^ ^ copVey plateau. There came a point, though, when our sensations cou       ^ to t any words the press would understand; and a later point when actual rule of strict censorship. ...  c0nes P
The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witch-
in an
A 1
the
Mountains of Madness
745 •
nac,es ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plane. «r speed they were very slow in gaining Prominen!e; ent"
U^they— bemhnitely « «^ and v.smle only because of meh abnmal height. Little by l.tt.e, however they rose gnm.y i„t0 the western sky; al.owing us t0 distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense 0f phantasy which they mspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of indescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation; as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultra-dimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things—mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher mountain skyline—regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the dream-like suggestions of primordial temple-ruins on cloudy Asian mountain-tops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances; of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings. Mytliolo-gists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory of man—or of his Predecessors—is long, and it may well be that certain tales have come down from 'ands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and earlier than any Umf ^rld we know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene on-fn for Ae fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devo-°f Tsathoggxta were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself. Leng, wherever *        or time it mi ht bfood was not a reglon I would care to be in or near; 2^ 1 *«* the proximity of a world mat had ever bred such ambiguou a —0SL as Ise Lake had just mentioned At the moment He tHat 1 had ever read the abhorred Necronomtcon, or talked so much with that P<;asantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the univers.ty *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'
labyrinth of 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 va"" ous nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted temporary forms of even vaster h.deousness. 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 un-known mourns ahead rose dizzying up like a fearsome rampart of *
T~ "i?"*- ***** -ith startling clearness even without a iM+» were owr fk» 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 _ ^ ^ camp and boring. The higher foothills shot up between five an _ YiW&f3^ forming a range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more ^ peaks beyond mem. At length Ropes—the student who had rel^VC ^ JJ Ae control-began to bead downward toward the left-hand dar^red ^ it as the camp. As he did ^ w.tv >
EWorld,
so. McTighe sent out the last uncensore
of c^^^o-expedition. . ftbe
' ***      the brief and unsatisfying bulletins at *
at
of °ur -
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 om , ^ rf 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 <n the blast were pitted and denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated. It is also true that we found none of the Archaean biological objects in a condition to rake outside as a whole. We did gather some Minerals ^rom a vast tumbled pile, including several of the greenish soapstone agments whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots ^used so many doubtful comparisons; and some fossil bones, among which were most typical of the curiously injured specimens.
None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow enclosure near the camp brTt a'm0St Wh°lly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though the greater 0(]ea age 0n the side next the camp, which was not the windward one, suggests an ^ard |eap or break q{ ^ themselves ^ three sledges were gone,
kno have ^ed to explain that the wind may have blown them off into the unto J**" THe driH and '«-melting machinery at the boring were too badly damaged the Darnmt SalvaSe' so ™ used them to choke up that subtly disturbing gateway to up of S'Which Lake had blasted. We likewise left at the camp the two most shaken-Danf , Planes' our surviving party had only four real pilots-Sherm, lav;, ' McTighe, and Ropes-in all, with Danforth in a poor nervous shape taJs J** We bought back all the books, scientific equipment, and other mcden-*d 4C°uld ^d, though much was rather unaccountably blown away. Spare tents Were either missing or badly out of condition.
rhe Mountains of Madness
antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded
747
report
Sherman, to
. 748
H. P. L
OVEc
Raft
lt was approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane Crying had forced us to give Gednev up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for relayi and 1 think we did well to keep it as calm and non-committal as we succeeded \ doing The most we said about agitation concerned our dogs, whose frantic uneasi. r the biological specimens was to be expected from poor Lake's accounts
. .i . i.  .1-.:- —. -c j-------
ness near:
».....—or      . ' account
We did not mention, I think, their display of the same uneasiness when sniffjng around the queer greenish soapstones and certain other objects in the disordered region; objects including scientific instruments, aeroplanes, and machinery both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had been loosened, moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have harboured singular curiosity and investigativeness.
About the fourteen biological specimens we were pardonably indefinite. We said that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough was left of them to prove Lake's description wholly and impressively accurate. It was hard work keeping our personal emotions out of this matter—and we did not mention numbers or say exactly how we had found those which we did find. We had by that time agreed not to transmit anything suggesting madness on the part of Lake's men, and it surely looked like madness to find six imperfect monstrosities carefully buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly like those on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to have been completely blown away.
We were careful, too, about the public's general peace of mind; hence Dan-forth and I said Htde about that frightful trip over the mountains the next day K was the fact that only a radically lightened plane could possibly cross a range of such height which mercifully limited that scouting tour to the two of us. On our return at I a.m. Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff "Pt*r V It took no persuasion to make him promise not to shew our sketches and the °**r things we brought away in our pockets, not to say anything more to ** others than what we had agreed to relay outside, and to hide our camera fib* ** pnvate^lopment later on; so that pan of my present story will be as new to W ^McTtghe, Rope,, Sherman, and the rest Jit will be to the world in
= will not tell even me. ittS^^Zr* ™[uded a^ofahard -cent; a confi^^
«**m«« on tlJT^ 31 ltast midale Comanchian rimes; a con^n ^ — that the caJT^ **
,nd*ate dissolved calcareous veins; a con,e^
At
the Mountains of Madness
• 749
certain slopes and passes would perm.t of the scaling and crossing of the entire fange by seasoned mountameers; and a remark that the mysterious other side ho a lofty and immense super-plateau as ancient and unchanging as the mou„, themselves-20,000 feet in elevation, with grotesque rock ^ thfough a thin glacial layer and with low gradual foothills between the general plateau surface and the sheer precipices of the highest peaks.
This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen hours—a longer time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitring, and rock-collecting programme called for—to a long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions; and told truly of our landing on the farther foothills. Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt any of the others into emulating our (light. Had any tried to do that, I would have used every ounce of my persuasion to stop them—and I do not know what Danforth would have done. While we were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson had worked like beavers over Lake's two best planes; fitting them again for use despite the altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism.
We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old base as soon as possible. Even though indirect, that was the safest way to work toward McMurdo Sound; for a straight-line flight across the most utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-dead continent would involve many additional hazards. Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our tragic decimation and the ruin of our drilling machinery; and the doubts and horrors around us—which we did not reveal—made us wish only to escape from this austral world of desolation and brooding madness as swiftly as we could.
As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without further •toasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next day-January "tlWrter a swift non-stop flight; and on the 28th we made McMurdo Sound » ^° 'aps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned by a faulty rudder m the ^s wind over the ice-shelf after we had cleared the great plateau. In five days the Arkham and Miskatontc, with all hands and equipment on board, were clear of the thickening field ice and working up Ross Sea with the mocbng of Victoria Land looming westward against a ^f^Z^ the wind.s wai]s mto a 1^ mustcal
clear of a haunted,:
a..    —" "«ven mat we were cieai «■ = "»------- ...    „ in the unknown
have -deblacka^blasphe^^^^
*S sm<* matter first writhed and swam on the explo-S^ our return we have all constantly worked » d^or^
750
H. P.L
ranon and far flinched or
^ have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves ^ thfulness. Even young Danforth, with h,s nervous breal«W,_ ^
babbled to his doctors—indeed, as I have said, there js
°"e thi.
,bich he will not tell even me. though I think it Woil,. ^ be
thinks he alone saw wn.cn ,c ,...........- -   -    -       • -.....k « w0u]d .
psychological state if he would consent to do sa It might explain and ^    «P Ij, though perhaps the tiling was no more than the delusive aftermath of ^ *H shock. That is the impression 1 gather after those rare irresponsible moments he whispers disjointed things to me—things which he repudiates vehem soon as be gets a grip on himself again.
It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and
eatlier Hen entlyas
some of
our
efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. mj have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results'8 ' announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown. Lake's reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused nam ralists and palaeontologists to the highest pitch; though we were sensible enough not to shew the detached parts we had taken from the actual buried specimens or our photographs of those specimens as they were found. We also refrained from shewing the more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish soapstones-while Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or drew on the super-plateau across the range, and the crumpled things we smoothed, studied in terror, and brought away in our pockets. But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organising, and with a thoroughness far beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last—even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.
I
IV.
T is ONLY WITH VAST HESITANCY AND REPUGNANCE THAT 1 LET MV MIND CO BA«
to Lake t camp and what we really found there—and to that other thing beyond «* tnghtful mountain wall. I am constantly tempted to shirk the details, and to let SEE T1 {™ ** mduc^ auctions. I hope I have said enough al-I hJe* y 7£* htkQy the rest; the rest, that is, of the horror at the camp-chinerv tfJ „ ^JW,nd"rava^ terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged *a-
bi«l°gKai lJ3f^       *■ 0( G«b"Y>      *e six insanely bu«*
^tTZ^T^ ""»*in **** a*    structural TkC
p Mountains of Madness
£t rht »751. checking up che canine bodies we found one dog raissing. We m ^
%        ** I'' X 1   3ntrh     1 h3Ve ***of it at all
m The princ'P31 thl"gS 1 haVC bee" keePlnS b** 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 ume I tried to keep the men's minds off those noints; for it was so much simpler-so much more normal-to lay everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake's party. From the look of things, that daemon mountain wind must have been enough to drive any man mad .      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 provision-Ches« 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 ^en 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 , h£ ^oT^-n faint snow-prints in one shielded COrner S half-impreSSlon  s£     irnpression did not concern human prints -.. . e rn
from
uPth,
r>,.;]
uecause mat unp^——- t-i"iis at aii ,
enclosure-^ ^ ^ rf fossi] prints which poQr ^ ^    i, bu, ^
Clearly,Ti tleprlceding weeks. One had to be careful of one's ^ rofC-hado^—nsofmadn^
As!
have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missi
~Ua1*d*» Ti/** liar! miQCprl (-tiTn .1___ . c*l
When we came on that ternble shelter we had missed 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" ** eted pans 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 not tofe' °
Inaeen, wc ------j - -«*m
things we had found-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 ro 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 Pmfd °Pen in    most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely places. The
eZr0 rr^ matches>      «^d ^minor
abouTLh i6 * M *** ™d *» sutts which we found lying
2 ******* »h^& concdvdJy due to clumsy efforts a, I*** adaptation. The ^ of ^ hJ, and ^ bodies, and
A*
the
fvlOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
751
„7V burial of the damaged Archaean specimens, were all nf a ■ f recarefnlly photographed aU the mam evidences of ^Sw:~ lX0Ut - — of the
P Our fir^ act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and npen the row of insane graves w.th the five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help noting the resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their clusters of Juped d°ts<t0 P°0r LakC'S deScnPtloI,s of ** st™ge 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 party. Our own first sight of the actual buried entities formed a horrible moment, and sent the imaginations of Pabodie and myself back to some of the shocking primal myths we had read and heard. We all agreed that the mere sight and continued presence of the things must have 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 ** out day of terror and bafflement; but not without a tentative plan for one or ^re range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with aerial camera and ^legist's outfit, beginning the following morning. It was decided that Danforth I try it flrst, and wc awaked at 7 a.m. intending an early trip; though heavy
. 754
brief bulletin to the outside world-—dela
staf
at
^mentioned in our
111 nearly nine °'f**~> &t non-committal story we told th, I have ahead)-rep^ ^ ^ sixteen hours Iater. ft h _
* r£layedrr^unt by filling » ^erciful blanks with hirits duty to amplify W^* rrans.montane world—hints of the revdtf-
now
, the hidden trans-
reallysawmtneu^ ^ colkpse. , wish he WQuld g^^JS
finally driven Dan ^ ^ hg a]one saw__even though & ^   y trarik
w0rd about the thing     ^ ^ ^ last straw ^ ^ ^ probaty
nervous delusio ^     4 n T      r^n is ro reneat his lafpr .
a
is: but
f-ff^against that. All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed whi"
he IS HI111 a6"      . .     _ , „ Jg*. cnarfd back thrmxyV, fV.„ _ .   . Sl
chriekin" as the plane soared back through the wind ■*
™o-»P»* rf eld.r horrors ,„ wh« , <,WoM *«J
last word. r ___uw*«f -mit-h the inner antarrtir-_... 1
enou;
ienot from
word. It me pi— -b~
lgh to keep others from meddling widi 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 ir 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 atmospheric influences unfavourable to change, and calculated to retard the J* eltmauc processes of rock disintegration
^uT£ mo7a,nside   of re^lar cubes'rampart5' t£>
fasanat«i and disturbed us most. I studied them with a *WT
ut: MOUNTAINS OF madness
755
took aerial photographs whilst Danfonh drove; and at times relieved him at 1 controls-chough my av.ation knowledge was purely an amateurs n7d Jet him use the binoculars. We could easily see that much of ^ J^** 1       was a hghash Archaean quartzite, unlike any formation vislble over ^
3 of thC geneI   7     ; "      31 ft ****** ™ «™ and uncanny to extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted.
30 £AS he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough material had saved them hom 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 0l- Kish as dug up by the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and I obtained that occasional impression of separate Cyclopean blocks, which Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll. How to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange regularities—like the famous Giants' Causeway in Ireland—but this stupendous range, despite Lake's original suspicion of smoking cones, was above all else non-volcanic in evident structure.
The curious cave-mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most abundant, presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity of outline. They were, as Lake's bulletin had said, often approximately square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand. Their numerousness and wide distribution were remarkable, and suggested that the whole region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata. Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within the caverns, but we saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites. Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the slight cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual patterns. Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the camp, he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities.
We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along toward the relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally looked down at the snow and ice of the land route, wondering whether we could have attempted *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 Ls with unusual continuity, and upon reachmg 0ur "T fmatLasefor-ednoexcepnon. t* we found tnat expectancy as we prepared to round the crest ,n ■
SSS^Shardly be descnl5ed on paper; e-* C
out over an untr ^ ^ ^       A gh tte
^ —d. The touch of evil mystery in these b ner ^ 2!« beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summit, ^ Ttohly subde and attenuated matter not to be explained tn hteral word, ^ was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association, tog 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 whistling or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave-mouths. There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions.
We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of 23,570 feet according to the aneroid; and had left the region of clinging snow definitely below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers—but with those provocative cubes, ramparts, and echoing cave-mouths to add a portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and the dream-like. Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the one mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart exactly 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 anj .unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that rac^ ^ugh the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, e*W
at
THE
^ nt glance, And then, having gained those last few feet, we did indeed
^ST*divide md over *e uns-pled secrets of an el
Mountains of Madness
V.
757
f think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mix£d ^
[ der, terror, and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the ^ * saw what lay beyond Of course we must have had some natural theory in £ back Df our heads to steady our faculties for the moment. Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado or ^e fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert Perhaps we even half thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on fl"t approaching those mountains of madness. We must have had some such normal notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal, tegular, and geometrically eurhythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest, and in places obviously thinner.
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully 20,000 feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than 500,000 years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defence could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause. We had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise, when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken r«gn of glacial death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean ™aze °f squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all corn-enable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark,
jective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material basis tr,r al^~"there had been some horizontal stratum of ice-dust in the upper air, and ; 1S sfl0cking stone survival had projected its image across the mountains accord-J to the simple laws of reflection. Of course the phantom had been twisted and ^ggerated, and had contained things which the real source did not contain; yet ^ '    *e saw that real source, we thought it even more hideous and menacing
m m distant image.
ram?"17 inc^ihle, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and Pans had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in the hundreds of ^ds_perhaps milHons_of        k had broaded there amidst the blasts of
75«
H- ****** a bleak upland. "Corona Mnndi... Root" of llie Woric!. . ." ,\|| S(>r|s (>).
phrases sprang to our Hps as we looked dizzily down .u the unfatdta ,,ble s&jSf
1 thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently hinted
since my first sight of this dead antarctic world—of the daemonic p|ut
Lena of die Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men of the Himalayas, of rh,> d V
....        ... "nakfiiir
Manuscripts with their pre-human implications, oi the Cthulhu cult, of the xe
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 !ittte 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 acmal 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 teet. 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 honeycomh-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 «os 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 scarred places where other and higher bridges of the same sort ha I ^ Closer inspection revealed coundess largish windows; some of which wej {fi with shutters of a petrified material originally wood, though most gape ^ ^ a sinister and menacing fashion. Many of the ruins, of course, were roo
Al
Mountains oi Madness
759
th lllieven though wind-rounded upper edges; whilst others, of a more sharply ^nica! <>r pyramidal model or else protected by higher surrounding structures.
ureservec
d intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling arid 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 on the ancient soapstones now assumed a vastly larger significance.
in many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice-sheet deeply riven from various geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn down to the very level of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from the plateau's interior to a cleft in the foothills about a mile to the left of the pass we had traversed, was wholly free from buildings; and probably represented, we concluded, the course of some great river which in Tertiary times—millions of years ago—had poured through the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly, 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 diings quite minutely, and take a careful series of photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret-—to know what sort of beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what relation to the general world of lts Urne or °f 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 ™!=leu.s 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~~n°t even of yesterday; a megalopolis ranking with such whispered pre-Wisphemies as Valusia. R'lveh. Th in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless
City     "~"raemtes as Valusia, R'lyeh, lb in i
in, ° Arabia Deserta. As we flew above that tangle of stark titan towers my tic alsnat,°n SOmetim.es 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
ams 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—after ss 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
•sdt°benoli .' 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 thre^A^ 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 about th^ ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semi" remembrances in both Danforth and me.
We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares-and noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill rose, it was generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling stone edifice; but there were at least 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, since 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 <~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 ski, were safely locfged, and that the vital 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-
fuj 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 built 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 1(^as"reliefs on the interior walls; facts we had indeed guessed before, when flying °Ver *is rampart and others like it. Though lower parts must have originally
762
H. P.
existed, all traces of such things were now wholly obscured by rhe de
ice and snow at this point.
We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to de
epi*yer0f
rly effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated fl^ ^ 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 Cyc|" 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 disproportion; shafts with odd bulbous enlargements; broken columns in curious groups; and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness. As we drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the ice"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 W must once have looked like-^ven though most of the roofs and tower-*> , necessarily perished. As a whole, it had been a complex tangle of twisted lan ^ alleys; all of then, deep canyons, and some little better than tunnels bee*"*, overhanging masonry or overarching bridges. Now, outspread below *
AT
THE
Mountains of Madnkss
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 subtle imaginary sound from some undefined point—a muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves yet somehow disturbingly different. The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape; and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place.
Nevertheless our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead; and *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 avai'able apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities.
roo7/ere ab°Ve °Ur reach> whilst °therS led °n,y int° ice_ch0ked niinS 33 ° ed and barren as the rampart on the hill. One, though spacious and invitrng,
°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 glacianor^ 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 the ^ 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 surviving building °   ^ u, bus elder world whose nature was becoming more and more hideously P> 0
* rtt;pr the rw
.d seem*
uamre was Becoming more and more i"">-— - jbjv In the end, however, we made the plunge; and scrambled up over the■*» %0
gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate slabs, a*1 ' form the outlet 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 diough 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 time. Indeed, one gained a curious impression that this place had been deliberately closed and deserted in some dim, bygone aeon, rather than overwhelmed by any sudden calamity or even gradual decay Had the coming of 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> heen 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
J-Warirl ' cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our ^at ^onst"1^8 insi^e t*lat 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 Öle h„ -,C S't0 t*le tread °f human feet. This is especially true because so much mUral can,1 ama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent Pr0ving th ^ ^ask%nt photographs of those carvings will do much toward tri"h 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 and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geo"' past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving curfo^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 pauper U 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 gigantirism of everything about us became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decoration*, 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 pot 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 run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wlde^r arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width g^en ° ^ » 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 the arabesque bands. . ^
The technique, we soon ,aw, was mature, accomplished, and evoked to the highest degree of civilised mastery; though utterly alien m ^ detail to any know,, ^ tradition ^ the human race. In delicacy of e**u
of Madness
767
quantity ittv
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 t^bold scaIe ot the carvinSs; 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 n»ity 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
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 « 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. 1!     abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal race—a chance circumstance ^"^ing, through coincidence, miraculously in our favour—which made the •"StaT "° 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 arrangement was varied by the presence of maps, astronomical charts,
id 8
H- P. Lov
THE
[viOL'NTAINS OP MADNESS
769
.li,,]
»nd other scientific designs on an enlarged scale—these things giving a „aj terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dad7 hinting at what the whole revealed. I can only hope that my account will not - ^ * curiosity greater than sane caurion on the part of those who believe m J^*8 would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death and horror by 2l wry 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_elabora 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 eJliprica)—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 biiarre 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 tiles, roosdv raUen now. Floors were also paved with such tiles, though plain stonework predominated.
As I have said, all furniture and other moveables were absent; but the sculptures gave a 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 derriras, fitter, and debris; but farther down this condition decreased. In some of the lower chambers and corridors there was little more than gritty dust or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncanny air of newly swept immacu-lateness. 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 seen 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 sculprured j* tails. Bdow the ice-cap, however, rhe twilight deepened; and in many pare o tangled ground level there was an approach to absolute blackness. ^ ^
To form even a rudtmentary idea of our thoughts and feelings ts ^ penetrated this aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry one must cor** *opdessIy Bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and ^P* ^ The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were e ^ overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements ^ recent gained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too fected by the temhle mural sculptures around us. The moment we r~
A 1
set š nnl;
t0 claim Danforilt and 1 had not independently suspected before, though
perfeť
um
k (llliy n brief study to give us the hideous truth—a truth which it would be
g, section of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it
!y 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 diis 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 Pnakotic Manuscripts and the N*ovnomkon arhightedly hint about. They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young—the beings whose substance an evolution 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 uI»n fragments of their millenniallv fossilised substance... and that poor Lake and his
Party 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 frjiy thrfit o,dock we go( smKd Qn ^ actual tour of system-
^**rch- The sculptures in the building we entered were of relatively late ^"""-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. Lev
kaft
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—«nd 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, 1 would refrain from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a madman. Of course, the infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale—representing the pre-terrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets, and in other galaxies, and in other universes—can readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge when they see the photographs I shall publish.
Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fraction of any connected story; nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages of that story in their proper order. Some of the vast rooms were independent units so far as their designs were concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss below even the ancient ground level—a cavern perhaps 200 feet square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly been an educational centre of some sort. There were many provoking repetitions of the same material in different rooms and buildings; since certain chapters of experience, and certain summaries or phases of racial history, had 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 outline; and much of that was ob^ 7 °" f™m,a        of the photographs and sketches we made. It may be » effect of d* later study-d* revived memories and vague impressions acting
?* ^ *** S6nSiti~ ^ wid. that final supposed *«* d«te source of Danforti,s .       ^     fof we coul J
issue our warning intelligently without the fullest possible information, ^ nuance of that warning is a prime necessi    Certain lmgering fS?* world of disordered time and alien natural law make it 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 batdes 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 mfluence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of ^.C°mrauri,ty- These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred thar13*^^ al>0Ut aS "sh°ggoths" in his frightful Necronomicon, though even ^ mac* A'rah 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
sho 1S PlanCt had synthesised their simple food forms and bred a good supply of an/80**'they allowed other cell-groups to develop into other forms of animal trouble^1*16     f°r SUndry PurPoses; extirpating any whose presence became
"esome.
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 325* °f St0ne not ^ those 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 W lecture 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^f' 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 shewed 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 apparendy 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 seeme 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 cuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings means of spores-like vegetable pteridophytes as Lake had suspected-but to thetr 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 ^en they had new regions to colonise. The young matured swiftly, and received
an
education evidently beyond any standard we can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring 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, chairs, and couches like cylindrical frames—for they rested and slept upright with f°lded-down tentacles—and racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books.
Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no cer-^"ttes in this regard cou,d 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 * very 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"oti0tl
« 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 evoT^ tion 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 parts northward, uphold in a striking way the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly.
With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began. Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that was not the worst misfortune. Another race—a land race of beings shaped like octopi and pro -ably corresponding to the fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu—soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a monstrous war which for* tíme 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
Mountains 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
(jtnui"" "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 onograph 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 dme, 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 15„ mmion years ag0j wnen 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 m Qnes      used cur.Qus weapons of molecular disturbance
1fnst *■ ^el entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory. There-, tet    scufotures shewed a period in which shoggoths were tamed and broken y arni«i 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 t0 U 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 die 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. Concern 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 centrifugal 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 t'«-
| 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. , 7* 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 'ight after long epochs in the course of the general crumpling of strata.
\ VIIL
|iar"]KALLY' DANFORTH AND I STUDIED WITH ESPECIAL INTEREST AND A PECU-
"n *hich    Personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district «n the t     Were- °f this local material there was naturally a vast abundance; and very ]ate j e Sr°tind 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». I.n
tuned sculptures of decadent workmunslup carrying the story of the .
beyond the period of the Pliocene mup whence we derived uur \m u^,,^*',mUe|i
of the pre-human world. This wan the hist place wr examined in dettii !
we found there gave us ti fresh immediate objective. wtoir
Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and m(w, |e
die corners of earth's globe. Of all existing lands it was infinitely the tnust 1 • '"
and ihe conviction grew upon us lhat this hideous upland must indeed K.. .i
* lilt' I'iKl j
nightmare plateau of leng which even the mad author of the Mvn,,,,,,,, . reluctant to discuss. The great mountain chain was tremendously |<>ng .s,Wils a low range at Luitpold Land on the coast of Weddell Sett and virtually lt .""^^
* "^ItllT lli,,
entire continent. The really high part stretched in a mighty arc from about I • '
82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70u, E, Longitude 115J, with its 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 eanh'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 pan of the ancient land—the first pan 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 desened. 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 1 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
,n ivitUlNIAINS 1)1 Madnuss
77»»
h„„ ubk i'1 l."'d and climb .hose hills, i m     M Hu.pljta, ^ M "'!! .nd ft** «■ ' "M<<l '" ' ('°.'!!" h"*h ,,0W    ,l,c F^'nmat, sculptor',
m |jghti»ing |*W*d '"''iiningl'iilly now Utd then ;,. each of the brooding K| thai an unexplained glow intone from on,- „| ,|„lfic ievnbh. |)illnat.|„ a„
the long l,l,lar niKlu- Tlwre m:iy b«" a vcry rt"ul     very monstrous mean-c old I'nakoiic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste. H„t the ivrrm close ut hand was hardly less strange, even if less namelessly
*«a» 1,1 tliroi'K11
,A Soon alter the founding of the city the greal mouniain-range became uccurwu. • .11        i .      i ii
he seat of 'he principal temples, and many carvings shewed what grotesque and lititastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only the curiously clinging .ubcs ramparts, in the course of ages the caves had appeared, and had been slwped inn* 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 different carvings of the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stages of the region's age-long, aeon-dead history; so that we were *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-^nstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was a million or ten million or
' milli°n years ago, for the sculptures told us exactly what die 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 catvjT 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 ^"^^^^ frequently interrupted in these late carvings) depicting a consrandy growing ^ Hon 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
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 Sfthis 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-'^mbed 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 frequently visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually bathed on the deep bottom of their great river. The darkness of inner earth could likewise have been no deterrent to a race accustomed to long antarctic nights.
Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings had a truly 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 aty, and other protoplasmic matter to mould into phosphorescent r^msfor%htingpurposes
tecture 3 migllty meTroP°lis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea; its archi-little d mUCh thM °f ^ city above' and itS workmansniP displaying relatively operas because of the precise mathematical element inherent in building gence "j T^ newlv bred shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular intelli-> and 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 v0( sort of musical piping over a wide range, if poor Lakes dissection had £^ aright-and to work more from spoken commands than from hyp,10tic su "*N as in earlier rimes. 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 decad^ The Old Ones seemed to realise this falling off themselves; and in manv anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially blocks of ancient carving from their land city, just as the emperor, in a sjmilar "* of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of their finest an to give his new Byzan^ 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 moveables, had been taken away.
The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this story were, as I have said, the latest we could find in our limited search. They left us with a picture of the Old Ones shuffling 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 tiroe 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 subterranean 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? Earing geology shews no trace *
THE
Mountains of Madness
781
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 ligl>tless and unPlumbed zby^5 of ear*'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 .13 a»tyB°rchgrevingk?
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 city and indeed the cavern itself, had no existence. They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around them, and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean.
And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens—especially about die 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 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 dizzy sunless c i fs 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 fahu-^ gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of resistance once we ew °f 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. anc! we nad not enough battery replacements to let our
784
H. P.
Lov
EcRaft
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 eSpecial| ' interesting or difficult places, we might manage to eke out a safe margin be^ 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 recourse 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 both of the neighbouring ones were choked it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly one choice.
at
-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 do*" again, encountering choked doorways and piles of debris, hastening now and ** along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate stretches, taking false leads an ™™cing our way (in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), *n0 ooce ,n a while striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight P0"^ or trickled down-we were repeatedly tantalised by the sculptured waUs ak<"*
THE
route.
M
OUNTAINS OF MADNESS
785
Many must have told tales of immense historical importance, and only
aspect 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 **   films we would certainly have paused briefly to photograph certain bas-nl°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 apparendy 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 "e who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many half-I ked 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 turned on more light we saw that a kind of swath 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 nme—the
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, \r/ 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 vatrup m\ ,
■ i j . b n°uehts
of responsibility toward Gedney—or what not—drive us on. Danforth whispera,j
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 obstruenon, 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 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 impress10^
one of anticlimax. For amidst the tittered expanse of that sculptured eW[Z -      - --* objec1
AT
ins'
787
perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet—there remained no recent
the Mountains of Madness
cantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively, though in vain, for a far-[kr doorway- In another moment, however, Danfonh'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 runnel-mouth therein. He might, I repeat, have Prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite obviously compiled as our °*n had been from late sculptures somewhere in the glacial labyrinth, though not ftom the ones which we had seen and used. But what this art-blind bungler could "ever nave 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 °* Uves after that; since our conclusions were now—notwithstanding their
788
H.
vho
ve l ra» den
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 ha"'1
less--^vjjii^^'-"-——     ' —*"un i
_ have read my account as far as this. Perhaps we were mad—for ha. grid 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—ox 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 wifhin 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 qu'* perfectly confirmed our own—and start back over the indicated course to thectf cular place; the course which our nameless predecessors must have traversed before us. The other neighbouring gate to the abyss would lie beyond that-1 ^ not speak of our journey—during which we continued to leave an economlCae(J ^ of paper—for it was precisely the same in kind as that by which we had rea « ^ cul de saq except that it tended to adhere more closely to the ground level an ^ descend to basement corridors. Every now and then we could trace certain
at
the
Mountains of Madness
- marks in the debris or litter under foot; and after we had passed outside the 'radius of the gasoline scent we were again faintly conscious—spasmodically—of "hat more hideous and more persistent scent. After the way had branched from our former course we sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls; noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which indeed seem to have formed a main aesthetic oudet fot the Old Ones.
About 9:30 p.m., while traversing a vaulted corridor whose increasingly glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight ahead and were able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were coming to the vast circular place, and that our distance from the upper air could not be very great. The corridor ended in an arch surprisingly low for these megalithic ruins, but we could see much through it even before we emerged. Beyond there stretched a prodigious round space—fully 200 feet in diameter—strown with debris and containing many choked archways corresponding to the one we were about to cross. The walls were—in available spaces—boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused by the openness of the spot, an artistic splendour far beyond anything we had encountered before. The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated, and we fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.
But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which, eluding the archways by a sharp turn ourward into the open floor, wound spirally up the stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart of those once climbing outside die monstrous towers or ziggurats of antique Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight, and the perspective which confounded the descent with the tower's inner wall, had prevented our noticing this feature from the air, and thus caused us to seek another avenue to the sub-glacial level. Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of engineering held it in place, but Danforth and 1 could merely admire and marvel. We could see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there, but what We saw seemed inadequate to the function performed. The thing was excellently preserved up to the present top of the tower-—a highly remarkable circumstance ln Vlew °f its exposure—and its shelter had done much to protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.
As we stepped out into the awesome half-daylight of this monstrous cylinder-°ttom—fifty million years old, and without doubt the most primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes—we saw that the ramp-traversed sides stretched
785
dizzily
UP to a height of fully sixty feet. This, we recalled from our aerial survey,
^eatlt an ^tside glaciation of some forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had seeii from the plane had been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot mound
790 •
H. P. Lo\
erenCe
res
>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 sculps 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 battering; whilst the choking was such that all the archways at the bottom seemed to have been recently half-cleared.
It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by which those others had descended, and that this would be the logical route for our own ascent despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere. The tower's mouth was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane than was the great terraced building we had entered, and any further sub-glacial exploration we might make on this trip would lie in this general region. Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips—even after all we had seen and guessed. Then as we picked our way cautiously over the debris of the great floor, there came a sight which for the time excluded all other matters.
It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the ramp's lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto been screened from our view. There they were—the three sledges missing from Lake's camp— shaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and debris, as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and contained things memorably familiar enough—the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with 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 outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others as well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical specimens; for there were two here, both stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive plaster where some wounds around the neck had occurred, and wrapped with patent care to prevent further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog-
Ai-
t-he
jvfoUNTMNS 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 'whole 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. Weil 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 the camp horror—it would have had a kind of hellish congru-ity 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 McMardo Sound that we shuddered to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief—it was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.
The muffled sound floated from sub-glacial recesses nearly opposite to the corridor whence we had come—regions manifestly in the direction of that other tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a living water-bird in such a direction—in a World whose surface was one of age-long and uniform lifelessness—could lead to only one conclusion; hence our first thought was to verify the objective reality of 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 c'eared; resuming our trail-blazing—with an added paper-supply taken with J^nous repugnance from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledges—when we flight behind.
Som^S *e g'aciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned *hoseTl°US dragginS 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-tl,e 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
■ ...   1.1. - JU«i« tfM „,»
ghfare on the ground and basement levels seemed open. The tunnel ac
the chart, ought to stan from the basement of a large pyramidal Staler/^
j 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. ' ^
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 miJ*.
suPp)ies
trip
as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing six feet high, yet we seemed to realise at once that it was not one of those orhe/ 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 mtJifferen^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 >n
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 *e °W °nCS remai"ed- Regretting— i" a flareup of the old spirit of -that we could not photograph these anomalous creatures, we shortly
[ft them to their squawking and pushed on toward the abyss whose openness was n0w 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 tunnel yawned indefinitely off at a steep descending grade, its aperture adorned with grotesquely chiselled jambs and lintel. From that cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air and perhaps even a suspicion of vapour proceeded; and we wondered what living entities other than penguins the limitless void below, and the contiguous honeycornbings 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 uributtoning our heavy garments. We wondered whether there were any actually igneous manifestations * °W) and whether the waters of that sunless sea were hot. After a short distance e fflasonry gave place to solid rock, though the tunnel kept the same propor-ft°ns and presented the same aspect of carved regularity. Occasionally its varying grade Decame 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 a*" 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 Wou](j 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 die 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 fiingi. 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 eJtef^ Except for the avenue through which we had come, this was true of the flo°r^ all the great galleries opening off from it; and the singularity of the «ndJB°^wsl 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 u-e cast a beam of torchlight over the tunnel walls— and stopped short in amazement at the supremely radical change which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage. We realised, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones' sculp-jure at the time of the tunnelling; and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now, in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanation—a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it.
This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail. It was counter-sunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections, but the height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface. Danforth had the idea that it was a second carving- -a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In nature it was wholly decorative and conventional; and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet. seeming more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique—an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognise as ^e °'d Ones' art; and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the Ungamly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner. That others had recendy 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 mY further decorative changes developed. Nothing of the sort was per-m^7 tn°ugh the carvings were in places rather sparse because of the numerous uiqU S of SR1°°th-floored lateral tunnels. We saw and heard fewer penguins, but whew j ^ Caught a vaEue suspicion of an infinitely distant chorus of them some-
stron.
<kep wjtj^ ^ eardi 'The new ^ ineXpliCable odour was abominably
visiblS' and We could detect scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of 6 Vapour ahead bespoke increasing contrasts in temperature, and the relative
796
H. P.
Lovec
■Uft
neatness of the sunless sea-cliffs of the great abyss. Then, quite unexpectedly saw certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead—obstructions which £1 quite definitely not penguins—and turned on our second torch after making ^ that the objects were quite stationary.
XI.
Still another time have i COME TO A PLACE WHERE it IS VERY DIFFICULT to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror. We saw as I have said, certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead; and 1 may add that our nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously by a very curious intensification of die strange prevailing foetor, now quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench of those others which had gone before us. The light of the second torch left no doubt of what the obstructions were, and we dared approach them only because we could see, even from a distance, that they were quite as past all harming power as had been the six similar specimens unearthed from the monstrous star-mounded graves at poor Lake's camp.
They were, indeed, as lacking in completeness as most of those we had unearthed—-though it grew plain from the thick, dark-green pool gathering around them that their incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency. There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake's bulletins would have suggested no less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us. To find them in this state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort of monstrous struggle had occurred down here in the dark.
Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks; and our ears now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those others disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? The obstructions did not suggest it, for penguin beaks against the tough tissues Lake had dissected could hardly account for the terrible damage our approaching glance was beginning to m e oul Besides, the huge blind birds we had seen appeared to be singularly Peacefour
Had there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent responsible;' If so, where were they? Were they close at hand and likely,0 ioC*h(_ immediate menace to us? We glanced anxiously at some of the smooth"flo0^tever era! passages as we continued our slow and frankly reluctant approach. * ^ the conflict was, it had clearly been that which had frightened the P^j^d their unaccustomed wandering. It must, then, have arisen near that faintly ^ rookery in the incalculable gulf beyond, since there were no signs that any
the
Mountains of Madness
797
normal!y dwelt here. Perhaps, we reflected, there had been a hideous running
l with the weaker Party seekin& to 8" back to the cached sledges when their Matters finished them. One could picture the daemoniac fray between namelessly Monstrous entities as it surged out of the black abyss with great clouds of frantic ""enguins squawking and scurrying ahead.
I Say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly nd reluctandy. Would to heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded— run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!
Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon realised the dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed, twisted, and ruptured as they were, their chief common injury was total decapitation, from each one the tentacled starfish-head had been removed; and as we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like some hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage. Their noisome dark-green ichor formed a large, spreading pool; but its stench was half overshadowed by that newer and stranger siench, here more pungent than at any other point along our route. Only when we had come very close to the sprawling obstructions could we trace that second, un-explainable foetor to any immediate source—and the instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures of the Old Ones' history in the Permian age 150 million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tormred cry which echoed hysterically through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil palimpsest carvings.
I came only just short of echoing his ay myself; for I had seen those primal sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had suggested that hideous slime-coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate Old Ones—those whom the frightful shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked t0 a ghastly headlessness in the great war of re-subjugation. They were infamous, "'ghtmare sculptures even when telling of age-old, bygone things; for shoggoths ^d their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by any be-'ngs- Tne mad author of the Necmnomicon had nervously tried to swear that none a been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had ever conceived 6m' Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and ^^eSses~^scous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spher-atJ mfir,"ely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more mot™°re su!len, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and One! ^""^Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old s willing to use arKj tQ cajve 3UCfi things?
• 7m • h' p' lov*c»ab
And now, when Danforth and 1 saw the freshly glistening and iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stanUk scenely with that new unknown odour whose cause only a diseased fancy C(T envisage—clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously or, a sm„oth"U d of the accursedly re-sculptured wall in a series of grouped dots ^we underwood^ quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those four mis5. ' others—for all too well did we suspect they would do no harm again. Poor devi^ After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them—M it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in thai hideously dead or sleeping polar waste—and this was their tragic homecoming.
They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they done? Thai awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia .. . poor Lake, poor Gedrtey... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What i facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, ifar-ipawn—whatever they had been, they were men!
They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped and roamed among the tree-ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done. They h*d tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seen—and what had they found? All this flashed in unison through the thougha of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot-groups of fresh slime on the will beside them—looked and understood what must have triumphed and surviv down there in the Cyclopean water-city of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyW whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if in a,l5wr to Danforth'i hysterical scream.
The shock of recognising that monstrous stime and headlessness had fro** us into mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that have learned of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment It won* that we stood there, but actually it could not have been more than ten fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled forward as if veritably *** some remoter advancing bulk—and then came a sound which upset much 0 ^ we had just decided, and m so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run l>*e
rHK Mountains Of Madness . 79, .
ast squawking, confused penguins over our former trail back to the city, along jce-sunke" megalithic corridors lo the great open circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp    'd frenzied automatic plunge for the sane outer air and light of day.
The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided; because it was what p»»r Lake'* dissection had led us to attribute to those we had just judged dead. It was, Danforth later told me, precisely what he had caught in infinitely muffled form when at that spot beyond the alley-corner above the glacial level; and it certainly had a shocking resemblance to the wind-pipings we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves. At the risk of seeming puerile I will add another thing, too; if only because of the surprising way Danforth's impression chimed with mine. Of course common reading is what prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic, spectrally snowy birds of that malign region's core. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"That, I may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing white mist—that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.
We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been unered, though we knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really wished to do so. We had a vague hope, however, that non-aggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason might cause such a being to spare us in case of capture; if only from scientific curiosity. After all, if such an one had nothing to fear for itself it would have no motive in harming us. Concealment being futile at this juncture, we used our torch for a running glance behind, and perceived that the mist was thinning. Would we see, at last, a complete and living specimen of those others? Again =«ne that insidious musical piping— "T«ktli-li! Tektli-lU"
Then, noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer, it occurred to us that the entity might be wounded. We could take no chances, however, since it Wa* Very obviously approaching in answer to Danforth's scream rather than in ftght from any other entity. The riming was too close to admit of doubt. Of the ^hereabouts of that less conceivable and less mention able nightmare—that foetid, u«glimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the and sent land pioneers to re-carve and squirm through the burrows of the we could form no guess; and it cost us a genuine pang to leave this prob-
v ctippled Old One—perhaps a lone survivor—to the peril of recapture and a niII*lessfate.
drrriog
our rua. The curling mist had JMOMi ^eed; whilst the straying md jutwitmg and displaying signs of a L^""* ir idatwdy minor confusion when we had
Owe
ot -
,e that sff-srer. wide-ranged piping-- "TdvU-iif T^U^ The dang wa* °°* wounded, but had merely paused
or.,
*^TdVtodto of «        kindred and the hellish shnie uiscrip^ ""wed** m** know wb* that daemon message was^ -b-ul ^
cawa> W *ew» how much Hnportance the beings attached to diev ^
ways coawfjed, and « were glad to be leaving those morbid r*]^ .f* yj even when scarcely seen—behind. '°^^A^whkh me advent of the cave inspired was the po^^ ^ lOMgnCHKMC* * tfawbewikfering focus of large galleries. There were several of the bawd aJbmo peognms in the open space, and it seemed clear that their fear of ne oncpirang ennry was enreme to the point of unaccounLability, if at j_ pom vc dawned our torch to the very lowest limit of travelling need, keeping it strictly » 6«« of us, the frightened squawking motions of the huge birds in the mat mtgi* rouffie our footfalls, screen our true course, and somehow set up a fab* lead. Amid* the churning, spiralling fog the littered and unglistening floor of the man wmi beyond this point, as differing from the other morbidly polished burrows, could hardly form a highly distinguishing feature; even, so far as we cook) conjecture, for those indicated special senses which made the Old Ones partly though h&periecdy independent of light in emergencies. In fact, we were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste. For we had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; since the consequences of low in those unknown foothill horicy combings would be unthinkable.
The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did take a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The penguins alone could not have saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they seem to have done so. Only a benign Cue kept the curling vapours thick enough at the right moment, for they were constantly shifting and threatening to vanish. Indeed, tltey <** M for a second just before we emerged from the nauseously re-sculpsj ^adimothecavtjso that we actually ought one first and only half-gb'<np« * *e oncoming entity a* we cast t final, desperately fearful glance backward bek* ^ ^ ^ rmidng with the penguin, in the hope of dodging P"^ fchefis* which screen*! u. was benign, that which gave u. the M$#*2*j
horror which ha, ever 1»« haunted tu.
the
juoontains OF MaDNESS
»01 .
^e^nKHivein looking ^^v.^^^
y .osunct of the pursued to gauge the ^ tnd ^ rf fc ^
^.aps «t was an automatic attempt to answer , .ubcoasooos o^oori rZi
*     *** 0t ^        **    ™ ^ on
jl. problem of escape, we were in no condition to observe and analyse details: vet "Z*> our latent brain-cells must have wondered at die rnessage brought thernby *J| ^Is- Afterward we realised what n was-that our retreat from the foetid ^e-coaring on those headless obstrijctions, and the comridem approach of the p^ng enoty. had not brought us the exchange of stenches which log* calkd j". In the neighbourhood of the prostrate things that new and lately unexpkm-jjle foetor bad been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely ^m place to the nameless stench associated with those others. This it bad not foac—foi instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually undfluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent each second.
So we glanced back—simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt die incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and dodged among die penguins of the labyrinth-centre ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping— "Tekeli-UJ Tekeli-li!"
I might as well be frank—even if I cannot bear to be quite direct—in stating what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other. The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that 1 wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through—perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left. Danforth wai totally unstrung, and the firet thing I remember of the rest of the journey was hearing him bght-headedry chant an hysterical formula in which I alone of mankind could have found atrytmng
insane irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the P«>guins; reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and—thank God—through ** now empty vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at once—eh* we **W not have been alive and blindly racing 1 shudder to think of what a shade difference in his nervous reactions might have brought
"South Station Under—Washington Under—Park Street Und#r~K*nds"~-~ ^•J—Harvard...." The poor follow w« chanting the famine* stations of the
802
H. P.
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ntas-°gue
Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful natlVc S(jj] sands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ntual had neither irre|ev ' nor home-feeling- It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the m0ns*^ nefandous analogy that had suggested it. We had expected, upon looking see a terrible and incredibly moving entity if the mists were thin enougn. b ' l° that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see—for the mists were all too malignly thinned—was something altogether different, and immeaSUra^ more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the {mJ tic novelist's 'thing that should not be'; and its nearest comprehensible anal is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform—the BrP black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.
But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faindy self-lurninous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unform-ing as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its land had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry—"Tekeli-liJ Tekeli-li/" And at last we remembered that the daemoniac shoggoths—given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot-groups expressed—had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters.
XII.
Danforth and I have RECOLLECTIONS OF EMERGING INTO the GREAT SCULP-tured hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream-fragments involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was as if we floated in a nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or orientation.
The grey
half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; but we did not go near those cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog. They have a strange and thank mausoleum, and I hope the end of this planet will find them still undisturbed.
It was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we first felt d»e v*^'
A1
803
THE Mountains of Madness
and short breath which our race through the thin plateau air had produced-not even the fear of collapse could make us pause before reaching the normal
, realm of sun and sky. There was something vaguely appropriate about
our
but
SffiS from those buried epochs; for as we wound our panting way up the sixty"-Lt cvlioder of primal masonry we glimpsed bes.de us a continuous procession f heroic sculptures in the dead race's early and undecayed technique—a farewell f 0m the Old Ones, written fifty million years ago.
Finally scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound of ambled blocks; with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward, and the brooding peaks of the great mountains shewing beyond the more crumbled structures toward the east. The low antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and deadness of die nightmare city seemed al! the starker by contrast with such relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape. The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapours, and the cold clutched at our vitals. Wearily resting die outfit-bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout our desperate flight, we rebunoned our heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walk through the aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our aeroplane waited. Of what had set us fleeing from the darkness of earth's secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all.
In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the foothills—the probable ancient terrace—by which we had descended, and could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on the rising slope ahead. Half way uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing-spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic palaeogean tangle of incredible stone shapes below us—once more outlined mystically against an unknown west. As we did so we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning haziness; the resdess ice-vapours having moved up to the zenith, where their mocking outlines seemed on the point of settling into some bizarre pattern which they feared to make quite definite or conclusive.
There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque acy a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights loomed dream-like against the beckoning rose-colour of the western sky. Up toward this simmering rim sloped the ancient table-land, the depressed course of the bygone nver Versing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in adoration of the scene's unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to into our souls. For this far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible m°jmtaim of the forbidden land—highest of earth's peaks and focus of earth's
' ha*ourers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets; shunned and prayed
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to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any livj earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams ac Jng Qf plains in the polar night—beyond doubt the unknown archetype of thatT^ "* Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof unholy primal hint evasively. We were the first human beings ever to see them—arif] , ,Cgends God we may be the last. v t0
If the sculptured maps and pictures in that pre-human city had told these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than 300 miles a none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence jut above that remote and  ' ^ rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccu y tomed heavens. Their height, then, must have been tremendous beyond all kn comparison—carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of after unexplainabl falls. Looking at them, 1 thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their accursed slopes—and wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently. I recalled how their northerly end must came near the coast at Queen Mary Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Ma-w-son's expedition was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed a measure of my overwrought condition at the time—and Danforth seemed to be even worse.
Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane our fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast enough range whose re-crossing lay ahead of us. From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously against the easr, again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the damnable honeycombs inside them, and of the frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their foetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave-mouths where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range. To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the summits—as poor Lake must have done when he made that early mistake about volcanism—and thought shiveringly of that kindred mist from which we had just escaped; of that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering altf* whence all such vapours came.
All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flj*« Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a very smooth I W off over the nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry sprea
at
r mountains of madness
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had done when first we saw it—so short, yet infinitely long, a time ago—and 'wan rising and turning to test the wind for our crossing through the pass. At . . i i„.r«l there must have been preat rlismrKa^^ ____.
t
high level there must have been great disturbance, smce the ice-dust cloud: 7the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things; but at 24,000 feet, the heigh needed for the pass, we found navigation quite practicable. As we drew close to % jutting peaks the wind's strange piping again became manifest, and I could see nforth's hands trembling at the controls. Rank amateur though I was, I thought at that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over bis duties he did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the
B_resolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountain-top vapour,
and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses' men off the Sirens' coast to keep that disturbing wind-piping from my consciousness.
But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely—yet I am afraid that Danforth will never be the same again.
I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind's piping and the engine's buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy We had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly—and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and °*e", at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest keeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving night-mares S(TJirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, e Glares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of those echoing, vapor-°us> *ormiiy honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single a0tastic> daemonic 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!„
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so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.
He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things ^ "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 distwkd 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 word of all too obvious source:
"Tek&li-li! Tekeli-lir
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