At The Mountains Of Madness

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