I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my
advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell
my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic?with
its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient
ice-cap?and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain.
Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I
suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be
nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and
arial, will count in my favour; for they are damnably vivid and
graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to
which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be
jeered at as obvious impostures; notwithstanding a strangeness of
technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.
      In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few
scientific leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of
thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in
the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; and on
the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in
general from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of those
mountains of madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure
men like myself and my associates, connected only with a small
university, have little chance of making an impression where matters of
a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.
      It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense,
specialists in the fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a
geologist my object in leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was
wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from
various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill
devised by Prof. Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had
no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this; but I did hope
that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along
previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort
hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection. Pabodie?s
drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was
unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to
combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the
small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata
of varying hardness. Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor,
collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording,
rubbish-removal auger, and sectional piping for bores five inches wide
and up to 1000 feet deep all formed, with needed accessories, no greater
load than three seven-dog sledges could carry; this being made possible
by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were
fashioned. Four large Dornier aroplanes, 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 aroplane and involving distances
great enough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a
quite unprecedented amount of material; especially in the pre-Cambrian
strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously
been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of
the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life-history of this
bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our
knowledge of the earth?s past. That the antarctic continent was once
temperate and even tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life of
which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern
edge are the only survivals, is a matter of common information; and we
hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy, and detail. When
a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would enlarge the
aperture by blasting in order to get specimens of suitable size and
condition.
      Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by
the upper soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed or nearly exposed
land surfaces?these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the
mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels. We
could not afford to waste drilling depth on any considerable amount of
mere glaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper
electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of
ice with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan?which we
could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition such as
ours?that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow
despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the antarctic.
      The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent
wireless reports to the /Arkham Advertiser/ and Associated Press, and
through the later articles of Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four
men from the University?Pabodie, Lake of the biology department, Atwood
of the physics department (also a meteorologist), and I representing
geology and having nominal command?besides sixteen assistants; seven
graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these
sixteen, twelve were qualified aroplane pilots, all but two of whom
were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigation
with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of
course, our two ships?wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions
and having auxiliary steam?were fully manned. The Nathaniel Derby
Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions, financed the
expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough despite the
absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials,
and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and
there our ships were loaded. We were marvellously well-equipped for our
specific purposes, and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen,
transportation, and camp construction we profited by the excellent
example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It
was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made our own
expedition?ample though it was?so little noticed by the world at large.
      As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbour on September
2, 1930; taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama
Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place
we took on final supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in
the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on our ship
captains?J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig /Arkham,/ and serving as
commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the
barque /Miskatonic/?both veteran whalers in antarctic waters. As we left
the inhabited world behind the sun sank lower and lower in the north,
and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62
South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs?table-like objects with
vertical sides?and just before reaching the Antarctic Circle, which we
crossed on October 20 with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were
considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered
me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried
to brace up for the worse rigours to come. On many occasions the curious
atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly
vivid mirage?the first I had ever seen?in which distant bergs became the
battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.
      Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive
nor thickly packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67, East
Longitude 175. On the morning of October 26 a strong ?land blink?
appeared on the south, and before noon we all felt a thrill of
excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain
which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we had
encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and its cryptic
world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range
discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and
sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on
the shore of McMurdo Sound at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South
Latitude 77 9'.
      The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great
barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the
low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun
of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice
and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the
desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible
antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a
wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide
range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me
disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded
me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich,
and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly
fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded /Necronomicon/ of the
mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever
looked into that monstrous book at the college library.
      On the seventh of November, sight of the westward range having
been temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day
descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with
the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to
the east the low, white line of the great ice barrier; rising
perpendicularly to a height of 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec,
and marking the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered
McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus.
The scoriac peak towered up some 12,700 feet against the eastern sky,
like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama; while beyond it rose the
white, ghost-like height of Mt. Terror, 10,900 feet in altitude, and now
extinct as a volcano. Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently,
and one of the graduate assistants?a brilliant young fellow named
Danforth?pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope; remarking
that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source
of Poe?s image when he wrote seven years later of

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good
deal of Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of
Poe?s only long story?the disturbing and enigmatical /Arthur Gordon
Pym./ On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the
background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their
fins; while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or
sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
      Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island
shortly after midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of
cable from each of the ships and preparing to unload supplies by means
of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on first treading
antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular
point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on
the frozen shore below the volcano?s slope was only a provisional one;
headquarters being kept aboard the /Arkham./ We landed all our drilling
apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks,
experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras both ordinary and arial,
aroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small portable
wireless outfits (besides those in the planes) capable of communicating
with the /Arkham?/s large outfit from any part of the antarctic
continent that we would be likely to visit. The ship?s outfit,
communicating with the outside world, was to convey press reports to the
/Arkham Advertiser?/s powerful wireless station on Kingsport Head, Mass.
We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer; but if
this proved impossible we would winter on the /Arkham,/ sending the
/Miskatonic/ north before the freezing of the ice for another summer?s
supplies.
      I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about
our early work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral
borings at several points on Ross Island and the singular speed with
which Pabodie?s apparatus accomplished them, even through solid rock
layers; our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our
perilous ascent of the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our
final assembling of five huge aroplanes at the camp atop the barrier.
The health of our land party?twenty men and 55 Alaskan sledge dogs?was
remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no really
destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most part, the
thermometer varied between zero and 20 or 25 above, and our experience
with New England winters had accustomed us to rigours of this sort. The
barrier camp was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for
gasoline, provisions, dynamite, and other supplies. Only four of our
planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material, the fifth
being left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storage cache
to form a means of reaching us from the /Arkham/ in case all our
exploring planes were lost. Later, when not using all the other planes
for moving apparatus, we would employ one or two in a shuttle
transportation service between this cache and another permanent base on
the great plateau from 600 to 700 miles southward, beyond Beardmore
Glacier. Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and
tempests that pour down from the plateau, we determined to dispense with
intermediate bases; taking our chances in the interest of economy and
probable efficiency.
      Wireless reports have spoken of the breath-taking four-hour
non-stop flight of our squadron on November 21 over the lofty shelf ice,
with vast peaks rising on the west, and the unfathomed silences echoing
to the sound of our engines. Wind troubled us only moderately, and our
radio compasses helped us through the one opaque fog we encountered.
When the vast rise loomed ahead, between Latitudes 83 and 84, we knew
we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the
world, and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning and
mountainous coastline. At last we were truly entering the white,
aeon-dead world of the ultimate south, and even as we realised it we saw
the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up to its
height of almost 15,000 feet.
      The successful establishment of the southern base above the
glacier in Latitude 86 7', East Longitude 174 23', and the
phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various
points reached by our sledge trips and short aroplane flights, are
matters of history; as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of Mt.
Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate students?Gedney and Carroll?on
December 13?15. We were some 8500 feet above sea-level, and when
experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down
through the snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of
the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at
many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing
mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus
obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous with the
great bulk of the continent to the west, but somewhat different from the
parts lying eastward below South America?which we then thought to form a
separate and smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen
junction of Ross and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the
hypothesis.
      In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiselled after boring
revealed their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings
and fragments?notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such
molluscs as lingulae and gasteropods?all of which seemed of real
significance in connexion with the region?s primordial history. There
was also a queer triangular, striated marking about a foot in greatest
diameter which Lake pieced together from three fragments of slate
brought up from a deep-blasted aperture. These fragments came from a
point to the westward, near the Queen Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a
biologist, seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling and
provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some of
the ripple effects reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks. Since
slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into which a sedimentary
stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself produces odd
distorting effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no reason for
extreme wonder over the striated depression.
      On January 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Daniels, all six of the
students, four mechanics, and I flew directly over the south pole in two
of the great planes, being forced down once by a sudden high wind which
fortunately did not develop into a typical storm. This was, as the
papers have stated, one of several observation flights; during others of
which we tried to discern new topographical features in areas unreached
by previous explorers. Our early flights were disappointing in this
latter respect; though they afforded us some magnificent examples of the
richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which
our sea voyage had given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains
floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world
would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams
and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight sun. On
cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying, owing to the tendency
of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with
no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.
      At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying 500
miles eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh
sub-base at a point which would probably be on the smaller continental
division, as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained
there would be desirable for purposes of comparison. Our health so far
had remained excellent; lime-juice well offsetting the steady diet of
tinned and salted food, and temperatures generally above zero enabling
us to do without our thickest furs. It was now midsummer, and with haste
and care we might be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious
wintering through the long antarctic night. Several savage windstorms
had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped damage through the
skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary aroplane shelters and
windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing the principal camp
buildings with snow. Our good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost
uncanny.
      The outside world knew, of course, of our programme, and was told
also of Lake?s strange and dogged insistence on a westward?or rather,
northwestward?prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new base.
It seems he had pondered a great deal, and with alarmingly radical
daring, over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into
it certain contradictions in Nature and geological period which whetted
his curiosity to the utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and
blastings in the west-stretching formation to which the exhumed
fragments evidently belonged. He was strangely convinced that the
marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically
unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution,
notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient a
date?Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian?as to preclude the probable
existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all
above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These fragments,
with their odd marking, must have been 500 million to a thousand million
years old. Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless
bulletins of Lake?s start northwestward into regions never trodden by
human foot or penetrated by human imagination; though we did not mention
his wild hopes of revolutionising the entire sciences of biology and
geology. His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 11?18
with Pabodie and five others?marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset
when crossing one of the great pressure-ridges in the ice?had brought up
more and more of the Archaean slate; and even I was interested by the
singular profusion of evident fossil markings in that unbelievably
ancient stratum. These markings, however, were of very primitive
life-forms involving no great paradox except that any life-forms should
occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I
still failed to see the good sense of Lake?s demand for an interlude in
our time-saving programme?an interlude requiring the use of all four
planes, many men, and the whole of the expedition?s mechanical
apparatus. I did not, in the end, veto the plan; though I decided not to
accompany the northwestward party despite Lake?s plea for my geological
advice. While they were gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie
and five men and work out final plans for the eastward shift. In
preparation for this transfer one of the planes had begun to move up a
good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound; but this could wait
temporarily. I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise
to be at any time without possible transportation in an utterly
tenantless world of aeon-long death.
      Lake?s sub-expedition into the unknown, as everyone will recall,
sent out its own reports from the short-wave transmitters on the planes;
these being simultaneously picked up by our apparatus at the southern
base and by the /Arkham/ at McMurdo Sound, whence they were relayed to
the outside world on wave-lengths up to fifty metres. The start was made
January 22 at 4 A.M.; and the first wireless message we received came
only two hours later, when Lake spoke of descending and starting a
small-scale ice-melting and bore at a point some 300 miles away from us.
Six hours after that a second and very excited message told of the
frantic, beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft had been sunk and
blasted; culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with several
markings approximately like the one which had caused the original
puzzlement.
      Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the
flight in the teeth of a raw and piercing gale; and when I despatched a
message of protest against further hazards, Lake replied curtly that his
new specimens made any hazard worth taking. I saw that his excitement
had reached the point of mutiny, and that I could do nothing to check
this headlong risk of the whole expedition?s success; but it was
appalling to think of his plunging deeper and deeper into that
treacherous and sinister white immensity of tempests and unfathomed
mysteries which stretched off for some 1500 miles to the half-known,
half-suspected coast-line of Queen Mary and Knox Lands.
      Then, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited
message from Lake?s moving plane which almost reversed my sentiments and
made me wish I had accompanied the party.

          ?10:05 P.M. On the wing. After snowstorm, have spied
    mountain-range ahead higher than any hitherto seen. May equal
    Himalayas allowing for height of plateau. Probable Latitude 76 15',
    Longitude 113 10' E. Reaches far as can see to right and left.
    Suspicion of two smoking cones. All peaks black and bare of snow.
    Gale blowing off them impedes navigation.?

      After that Pabodie, the men, and I hung breathlessly over the
receiver. Thought of this titanic mountain rampart 700 miles away
inflamed our deepest sense of adventure; and we rejoiced that our
expedition, if not ourselves personally, had been its discoverers. In
half an hour Lake called us again.

          ?Moulton?s plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but
    nobody hurt and perhaps can repair. Shall transfer essentials to
    other three for return or further moves if necessary, but no more
    heavy plane travel needed just now. Mountains surpass anything in
    imagination. Am going up scouting in Carroll?s plane, with all
    weight out. You can?t imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must
    go over 35,000 feet. Everest out of the running. Atwood to work out
    height with theodolite while Carroll and I go up. Probably wrong
    about cones, for formations look stratified. Possibly pre-Cambrian
    slate with other strata mixed in. Queer skyline effects?regular
    sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks. Whole thing marvellous
    in red-gold light of low sun. Like land of mystery in a dream or
    gateway to forbidden world of untrodden wonder. Wish you were here
    to study.?

      Though it was technically sleeping-time, not one of us listeners
thought for a moment of retiring. It must have been a good deal the same
at McMurdo Sound, where the supply cache and the /Arkham/ were also
getting the messages; for Capt. Douglas gave out a call congratulating
everybody on the important find, and Sherman, the cache operator,
seconded his sentiments. We were sorry, of course, about the damaged
aroplane; but hoped it could be easily mended. Then, at 11 P.M., came
another call from Lake.

          ?Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don?t dare try really
    tall peaks in present weather, but shall later. Frightful work
    climbing, and hard going at this altitude, but worth it. Great range
    fairly solid, hence can?t get any glimpses beyond. Main summits
    exceed Himalayas, and very queer. Range looks like pre-Cambrian
    slate, with plain signs of many other upheaved strata. Was wrong
    about volcanism. Goes farther in either direction than we can see.
    Swept clear of snow above about 21,000 feet. Odd formations on
    slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly
    vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low vertical ramparts, like
    the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich?s
    paintings. Impressive from distance. Flew close to some, and Carroll
    thought they were formed of smaller separate pieces, but that is
    probably weathering. Most edges crumbled and rounded off as if
    exposed to storms and climate changes for millions of years. Parts,
    especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-coloured rock than any
    visible strata on slopes proper, hence an evidently crystalline
    origin. Close flying shews many cave-mouths, some unusually regular
    in outline, square or semicircular. You must come and investigate.
    Think I saw rampart squarely on top of one peak. Height seems about
    30,000 to 35,000 feet. Am up 21,500 myself, in devilish gnawing
    cold. Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of
    caves, but no flying danger so far.?

      From then on for another half-hour Lake kept up a running fire of
comment, and expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on
foot. I replied that I would join him as soon as he could send a plane,
and that Pabodie and I would work out the best gasoline plan?just where
and how to concentrate our supply in view of the expedition?s altered
character. Obviously, Lake?s boring operations, as well as his aroplane
activities, would need a great deal delivered for the new base which he
was to establish at the foot of the mountains; and it was possible that
the eastward flight might not be made after all this season. In
connexion with this business I called Capt. Douglas and asked him to get
as much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the single
dog-team we had left there. A direct route across the unknown region
between Lake and McMurdo Sound was what we really ought to establish.
      Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp
stay where Moulton?s plane had been forced down, and where repairs had
already progressed somewhat. The ice-sheet was very thin, with dark
ground here and there visible, and he would sink some borings and blasts
at that very point before making any sledge trips or climbing
expeditions. He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and
the queer state of his sensations at being in the lee of vast silent
pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at the
world?s rim. Atwood?s theodolite observations had placed the height of
the five tallest peaks at from 30,000 to 34,000 feet. The windswept
nature of the terrain clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the
occasional existence of prodigious gales violent beyond anything we had
so far encountered. His camp lay a little more than five miles from
where the higher foothills abruptly rose. I could almost trace a note of
subconscious alarm in his words?flashed across a glacial void of 700
miles?as he urged that we all hasten with the matter and get the strange
new region disposed of as soon as possible. He was about to rest now,
after a continuous day?s work of almost unparalleled speed,
strenuousness, and results.
      In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and
Capt. Douglas at their widely separated bases; and it was agreed that
one of Lake?s planes would come to my base for Pabodie, the five men,
and myself, as well as for all the fuel it could carry. The rest of the
fuel question, depending on our decision about an easterly trip, could
wait for a few days; since Lake had enough for immediate camp heat and
borings. Eventually the old southern base ought to be restocked; but if
we postponed the easterly trip we would not use it till the next summer,
and meanwhile Lake must send a plane to explore a direct route between
his new mountains and McMurdo Sound.
      Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long
period, as the case might be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would
probably fly straight from Lake?s base to the /Arkham/ without returning
to this spot. Some of our conical tents had already been reinforced by
blocks of hard snow, and now we decided to complete the job of making a
permanent Esquimau village. Owing to a very liberal tent supply, Lake
had with him all that his base would need even after our arrival. I
wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be ready for the northwestward move
after one day?s work and one night?s rest.
      Our labours, however, were not very steady after 4 P.M.; for about
that time Lake began sending in the most extraordinary and excited
messages. His working day had started unpropitiously; since an aroplane
survey of the nearly exposed rock surfaces shewed an entire absence of
those Archaean and primordial strata for which he was looking, and which
formed so great a part of the colossal peaks that loomed up at a
tantalising distance from the camp. Most of the rocks glimpsed were
apparently Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones and Permian and Triassic
schists, with now and then a glossy black outcropping suggesting a hard
and slaty coal. This rather discouraged Lake, whose plans all hinged on
unearthing specimens more than 500 million years older. It was clear to
him that in order to recover the Archaean slate vein in which he had
found the odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from
these foothills to the steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves.
      He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of
the expedition?s general programme; hence set up the drill and put five
men to work with it while the rest finished settling the camp and
repairing the damaged aroplane. The softest visible rock?a sandstone
about a quarter of a mile from the camp?had been chosen for the first
sampling; and the drill made excellent progress without much
supplementary blasting. It was about three hours afterward, following
the first really heavy blast of the operation, that the shouting of the
drill crew was heard; and that young Gedney?the acting foreman?rushed
into the camp with the startling news.
      They had struck a cave. Early in the boring the sandstone had
given place to a vein of Comanchian limestone full of minute fossil
cephalopods, corals, echini, and spirifera, and with occasional
suggestions of siliceous sponges and marine vertebrate bones?the latter
probably of teliosts, sharks, and ganoids. This in itself was important
enough, as affording the first vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet
secured; but when shortly afterward the drill-head dropped through the
stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and doubly intense wave of
excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized blast had laid open
the subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged aperture perhaps five
feet across and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers
a section of shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fifty million
years ago by the trickling ground waters of a bygone tropic world.
      The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep, but
extended off indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly
moving air which suggested its membership in an extensive subterranean
system. Its roof and floor were abundantly equipped with large
stalactites and stalagmites, some of which met in columnar form; but
important above all else was the vast deposit of shells and bones which
in places nearly choked the passage. Washed down from unknown jungles of
Mesozoic tree-ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads,
fan-palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained
representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species
than the greatest palaeontologist could have counted or classified in a
year. Molluscs, crustacean armour, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds,
and early mammals?great and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney
ran back to the camp shouting, and no wonder everyone else dropped work
and rushed headlong through the biting cold to where the tall derrick
marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished aeons.
      When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity he
scribbled a message in his notebook and had young Moulton run back to
the camp to despatch it by wireless. This was my first word of the
discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones of
ganoids and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts,
great mososaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armour-plates,
pterodactyl teeth and wing-bones, archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks?
teeth, primitive bird-skulls, and skulls, vertebrae, and other bones of
archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, xiphodons, dinocerases, eohippi,
oreodons, and titanotheres. There was nothing as recent as a mastodon,
elephant, true camel, deer, or bovine animal; hence Lake concluded that
the last deposits had occurred during the Oligocene age, and that the
hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried, dead, and inaccessible
state for at least thirty million years.
      On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life-forms was
singular in the highest degree. Though the limestone formation was, on
the evidence of such typical imbedded fossils as ventriculites,
positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not a particle earlier; the
free fragments in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from
organisms hitherto considered as peculiar to far older periods?even
rudimentary fishes, molluscs, and corals as remote as the Silurian or
Ordovician. The inevitable inference was that in this part of the world
there had been a remarkable and unique degree of continuity between the
life of over 300 million years ago and that of only thirty million years
ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene age when
the cavern was closed, was of course past all speculation. In any event,
the coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some 500,000 years
ago?a mere yesterday as compared with the age of this cavity?must have
put an end to any of the primal forms which had locally managed to
outlive their common terms.
      Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had
another bulletin written and despatched across the snow to the camp
before Moulton could get back. After that Moulton stayed at the wireless
in one of the planes; transmitting to me?and to the / Arkham/ for
relaying to the outside world?the frequent postscripts which Lake sent
him by a succession of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers
will remember the excitement created among men of science by that
afternoon?s reports?reports which have finally led, after all these
years, to the organisation of that very Starkweather-Moore Expedition
which I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I had better give
the messages literally as Lake sent them, and as our base operator
McTighe translated them from his pencil shorthand.

          ?Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and
    limestone fragments from blasts. Several distinct triangular
    striated prints like those in Archaean slate, proving that source
    survived from over 600 million years ago to Comanchian times without
    more than moderate morphological changes and decrease in average
    size. Comanchian prints apparently more primitive or decadent, if
    anything, than older ones. Emphasise importance of discovery in
    press. Will mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics
    and physics. Joins up with my previous work and amplifies
    conclusions. Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has
    seen whole cycle or cycles of organic life before known one that
    begins with Archaeozoic cells. Was evolved and specialised not later
    than thousand million years ago, when planet was young and recently
    uninhabitable for any life-forms or normal protoplasmic structure.
    Question arises when, where, and how development took place.?
    ????????

          ?Later. Examining certain skeletal fragments of large land and
    marine saurians and primitive mammals, find singular local wounds or
    injuries to bony structure not attributable to any known predatory
    or carnivorous animal of any period. Of two sorts?straight,
    penetrant bores, and apparently hacking incisions. One or two cases
    of cleanly severed bone. Not many specimens affected. Am sending to
    camp for electric torches. Will extend search area underground by
    hacking away stalactites.?
    ????????

          ?Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six
    inches across and an inch and a half thick, wholly unlike any
    visible local formation. Greenish, but no evidences to place its
    period. Has curious smoothness and regularity. Shaped like
    five-pointed star with tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage
    at inward angles and in centre of surface. Small, smooth depression
    in centre of unbroken surface. Arouses much curiosity as to source
    and weathering. Probably some freak of water action. Carroll, with
    magnifier, thinks he can make out additional markings of geologic
    significance. Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns. Dogs growing
    uneasy as we work, and seem to hate this soapstone. Must see if it
    has any peculiar odour. Will report again when Mills gets back with
    light and we start on underground area.?
    ????????

          ?10:15 P.M. Important discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins,
    working underground at 9:45 with light, found monstrous
    barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable
    unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata. Tissue
    evidently preserved by mineral salts. Tough as leather, but
    astonishing flexibility retained in places. Marks of broken-off
    parts at ends and around sides. Six feet end to end, 3.5 feet
    central diameter, tapering to 1 foot at each end. Like a barrel with
    five bulging ridges in place of staves. Lateral breakages, as of
    thinnish stalks, are at equator in middle of these ridges. In
    furrows between ridges are curious growths. Combs or wings that fold
    up and spread out like fans. All greatly damaged but one, which
    gives almost seven-foot wing spread. Arrangement reminds one of
    certain monsters of primal myth, especially fabled Elder Things in
    /Necronomicon./ These wings seem to be membraneous, stretched on
    framework of glandular tubing. Apparent minute orifices in frame
    tubing at wing tips. Ends of body shrivelled, giving no clue to
    interior or to what has been broken off there. Must dissect when we
    get back to camp. Can?t decide whether vegetable or animal. Many
    features obviously of almost incredible primitiveness. Have set all
    hands cutting stalactites and looking for further specimens.
    Additional scarred bones found, but these must wait. Having trouble
    with dogs. They can?t endure the new specimen, and would probably
    tear it to pieces if we didn?t keep it at a distance from them.?
    ????????

          ?11:30 P.M. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas. Matter of
    highest?I might say transcendent?importance. /Arkham/ must relay to
    Kingsport Head Station at once. Strange barrel growth is the
    Archaean thing that left prints in rocks. Mills, Boudreau, and
    Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more at underground point forty
    feet from aperture. Mixed with curiously rounded and configured
    soapstone fragments smaller than one previously found?star-shaped
    but no marks of breakage except at some of the points. Of organic
    specimens, eight apparently perfect, with all appendages. Have
    brought all to surface, leading off dogs to distance. They cannot
    stand the things. Give close attention to description and repeat
    back for accuracy. Papers must get this right.
          ?Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot five-ridged
    barrel torso 3.5 feet central diameter, 1 foot end diameters. Dark
    grey, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membraneous wings
    of same colour, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges.
    Wing framework tubular or glandular, of lighter grey, with orifices
    at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one
    at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges, are
    five systems of light grey flexible arms or tentacles found tightly
    folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over 3 feet.
    Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks 3 inches diameter
    branch after 6 inches into five sub-stalks, each of which branches
    after 8 inches into five small, tapering tentacles or tendrils,
    giving each stalk a total of 25 tentacles.
          ?At top of torso blunt bulbous neck of lighter grey with
    gill-like suggestions holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped
    apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various
    prismatic colours. Head thick and puffy, about 2 feet point to
    point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each
    point. Slit in exact centre of top probably breathing aperture. At
    end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane
    rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently
    an eye. Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles
    of starfish-shaped head and end in sac-like swellings of same colour
    which upon pressure open to bell-shaped orifices 2 inches maximum
    diameter and lined with sharp white tooth-like projections. Probable
    mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish-head found
    folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and
    torso. Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness.
          ?At bottom of torso rough but dissimilarly functioning
    counterparts of head arrangements exist. Bulbous light-grey
    pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed
    starfish-arrangement. Tough, muscular arms 4 feet long and tapering
    from 7 inches diameter at base to about 2.5 at point. To each point
    is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membraneous triangle
    8 inches long and 6 wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or
    pseudo-foot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million
    to fifty or sixty million years old. From inner angles of
    starfish-arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from 3
    inches diameter at base to 1 at tip. Orifices at tips. All these
    parts infinitely tough and leathery, but extremely flexible.
    Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some
    sort, marine or otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of
    exaggerated muscularity. As found, all these projections tightly
    folded over pseudo-neck and end of torso, corresponding to
    projections at other end.
          ?Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom,
    but odds now favour animal. Probably represents incredibly advanced
    evolution of radiata without loss of certain primitive features.
    Echinoderm resemblances unmistakable despite local contradictory
    evidences. Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine
    habitat, but may have use in water navigation. Symmetry is curiously
    vegetable-like, suggesting vegetable?s essentially up-and-down
    structure rather than animal?s fore-and-aft structure. Fabulously
    early date of evolution, preceding even simplest Archaean protozoa
    hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to origin.
          ?Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain
    creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence
    outside antarctic becomes inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read
    /Necronomicon/ and seen Clark Ashton Smith?s nightmare paintings
    based on text, and will understand when I speak of Elder Things
    supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake. Students
    have always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative
    treatment of very ancient tropical radiata. Also like prehistoric
    folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of?Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.
          ?Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably of late
    Cretaceous or early Eocene period, judging from associated
    specimens. Massive stalagmites deposited above them. Hard work
    hewing out, but toughness prevented damage. State of preservation
    miraculous, evidently owing to limestone action. No more found so
    far, but will resume search later. Job now to get fourteen huge
    specimens to camp without dogs, which bark furiously and can?t be
    trusted near them. With nine men?three left to guard the dogs?we
    ought to manage the three sledges fairly well, though wind is bad.
    Must establish plane communication with McMurdo Sound and begin
    shipping material. But I?ve got to dissect one of these things
    before we take any rest. Wish I had a real laboratory here. Dyer
    better kick himself for having tried to stop my westward trip. First
    the world?s greatest mountains, and then this. If this last isn?t
    the high spot of the expedition, I don?t know what is. We?re made
    scientifically. Congrats, Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the
    cave. Now will /Arkham/ please repeat description??

      The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report
were almost beyond description, nor were our companions much behind us
in enthusiasm. McTighe, who had hastily translated a few high spots as
they came from the droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message
from his shorthand version as soon as Lake?s operator signed off. All
appreciated the epoch-making significance of the discovery, and I sent
Lake congratulations as soon as the /Arkham/?s operator had repeated
back the descriptive parts as requested; and my example was followed by
Sherman from his station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache, as well as
by Capt. Douglas of the /Arkham/. Later, as head of the expedition, I
added some remarks to be relayed through the /Arkham/ to the outside
world. Of course, rest was an absurd thought amidst this excitement; and
my only wish was to get to Lake?s camp as quickly as I could. It
disappointed me when he sent word that a rising mountain gale made early
arial travel impossible.
      But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish
disappointment. Lake was sending more messages, and told of the
completely successful transportation of the fourteen great specimens to
the camp. It had been a hard pull, for the things were surprisingly
heavy; but nine men had accomplished it very neatly. Now some of the
party were hurriedly building a snow corral at a safe distance from the
camp, to which the dogs could be brought for greater convenience in
feeding. The specimens were laid out on the hard snow near the camp,
save for one on which Lake was making crude attempts at dissection.
      This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been
expected; for despite the heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised
laboratory tent, the deceptively flexible tissues of the chosen
specimen?a powerful and intact one?lost nothing of their more than
leathery toughness. Lake was puzzled as to how he might make the
requisite incisions without violence destructive enough to upset all the
structural niceties he was looking for. He had, it is true, seven more
perfect specimens; but these were too few to use up recklessly unless
the cave might later yield an unlimited supply. Accordingly he removed
the specimen and dragged in one which, though having remnants of the
starfish-arrangements at both ends, was badly crushed and partly
disrupted along one of the great torso furrows.
      Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and
provocative indeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with
instruments hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the little that
was achieved left us all awed and bewildered. Existing biology would
have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no product of any
cell-growth science knows about. There had been scarcely any mineral
replacement, and despite an age of perhaps forty million years the
internal organs were wholly intact. The leathery, undeteriorative, and
almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing?s
form of organisation; and pertained to some palaeogean cycle of
invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation. At
first all that Lake found was dry, but as the heated tent produced its
thawing effect, organic moisture of pungent and offensive odour was
encountered toward the thing?s uninjured side. It was not blood, but a
thick, dark-green fluid apparently answering the same purpose. By the
time Lake reached this stage all 37 dogs had been brought to the still
uncompleted corral near the camp; and even at that distance set up a
savage barking and show of restlessness at the acrid, diffusive smell.
      Far from helping to place the strange entity, this provisional
dissection merely deepened its mystery. All guesses about its external
members had been correct, and on the evidence of these one could hardly
hesitate to call the thing animal; but internal inspection brought up so
many vegetable evidences that Lake was left hopelessly at sea. It had
digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste matter through the
reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base. Cursorily, one would say that
its respiratory apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide; and
there were odd evidences of air-storage chambers and methods of shifting
respiration from the external orifice to at least two other fully
developed breathing-systems?gills and pores. Clearly, it was amphibian
and probably adapted to long airless hibernation-periods as well. Vocal
organs seemed present in connexion with the main respiratory system, but
they presented anomalies beyond immediate solution. Articulate speech,
in the sense of syllable-utterance, seemed barely conceivable; but
musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly probable. The
muscular system was almost preternaturally developed.
      The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave
Lake aghast. Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects,
the thing had a set of ganglial centres and connectives arguing the very
extremes of specialised development. Its five-lobed brain was
surprisingly advanced; and there were signs of a sensory equipment,
served in part through the wiry cilia of the head, involving factors
alien to any other terrestrial organism. Probably it had more than five
senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from any existing
analogy. It must, Lake thought, have been a creature of keen
sensitiveness and delicately differentiated functions in its primal
world; much like the ants and bees of today. It reproduced like the
vegetable cryptogams, especially the pteridophytes; having spore-cases
at the tips of the wings and evidently developing from a thallus or
prothallus.
      But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like
a radiate, but was clearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but
had three-fourths of the essentials of animal structure. That it was
marine in origin, its symmetrical contour and certain other attributes
clearly indicated; yet one could not be exact as to the limit of its
later adaptations. The wings, after all, held a persistent suggestion of
the arial. How it could have undergone its tremendously complex
evolution on a new-born earth in time to leave prints in Archaean rocks
was so far beyond conception as to make Lake whimsically recall the
primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and
concocted earth-life as a joke or mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic
hill things from Outside told by a folklorist colleague in Miskatonic?s
English department.
      Naturally, he considered the possibility of the pre-Cambrian
prints? having been made by a less evolved ancestor of the present
specimens; but quickly rejected this too facile theory upon considering
the advanced structural qualities of the older fossils. If anything, the
later contours shewed decadence rather than higher evolution. The size
of the pseudo-feet had decreased, and the whole morphology seemed
coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs just examined
held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more
complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent.
Altogether, little could be said to have been solved; and Lake fell back
on mythology for a provisional name?jocosely dubbing his finds ?The
Elder Ones?.
      At about 2:30 A.M., having decided to postpone further work and
get a little rest, he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin,
emerged from the laboratory tent, and studied the intact specimens with
renewed interest. The ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber up
their tissues a trifle, so that the head-points and tubes of two or
three shewed signs of unfolding; but Lake did not believe there was any
danger of immediate decomposition in the almost sub-zero air. He did,
however, move all the undissected specimens closer together and throw a
spare tent over them in order to keep off the direct solar rays. That
would also help to keep their possible scent away from the dogs, whose
hostile unrest was really becoming a problem even at their substantial
distance and behind the higher and higher snow walls which an increased
quota of the men were hastening to raise around their quarters. He had
to weight down the corners of the tent-cloth with heavy blocks of snow
to hold it in place amidst the rising gale, for the titan mountains
seemed about to deliver some gravely severe blasts. Early apprehensions
about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and under Atwood?s
supervision precautions were taken to bank the tents, new dog-corral,
and crude aroplane shelters with snow on the mountainward side. These
latter shelters, begun with hard snow blocks during odd moments, were by
no means as high as they should have been; and Lake finally detached all
hands from other tasks to work on them.
      It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and
advised us all to share the rest period his outfit would take when the
shelter walls were a little higher. He held some friendly chat with
Pabodie over the ether, and repeated his praise of the really marvellous
drills that had helped him make his discovery. Atwood also sent
greetings and praises. I gave Lake a warm word of congratulation, owning
up that he was right about the western trip; and we all agreed to get in
touch by wireless at ten in the morning. If the gale was then over, Lake
would send a plane for the party at my base. Just before retiring I
despatched a final message to the /Arkham/ with instructions about
toning down the day?s news for the outside world, since the full details
seemed radical enough to rouse a wave of incredulity until further
substantiated. None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning;
for both the excitement of Lake?s discovery and the mounting fury of the
wind were against such a thing. So savage was the blast, even where we
were, that we could not help wondering how much worse it was at Lake?s
camp, directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it.
McTighe was awake at ten o?clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless,
as agreed, but some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the
westward seemed to prevent communication. We did, however, get the
/Arkham,/ and Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly trying to
reach Lake. He had not known about the wind, for very little was blowing
at McMurdo Sound despite its persistent rage where we were.
      Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake
at intervals, but invariably without results. About noon a positive
frenzy of wind stampeded out of the west, causing us to fear for the
safety of our camp; but it eventually died down, with only a moderate
relapse at 2 P.M. After three o?clock it was very quiet, and we
redoubled our efforts to get Lake. Reflecting that he had four planes,
each provided with an excellent short-wave outfit, we could not imagine
any ordinary accident capable of crippling all his wireless equipment at
once. Nevertheless the stony silence continued; and when we thought of
the delirious force the wind must have had in his locality we could not
help making the most direful conjectures.
      By six o?clock our fears had become intense and definite, and
after a wireless consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved
to take steps toward investigation. The fifth aroplane, which we had
left at the McMurdo Sound supply cache with Sherman and two sailors, was
in good shape and ready for instant use; and it seemed that the very
emergency for which it had been saved was now upon us. I got Sherman by
wireless and ordered him to join me with the plane and the two sailors
at the southern base as quickly as possible; the air conditions being
apparently highly favourable. We then talked over the personnel of the
coming investigation party; and decided that we would include all hands,
together with the sledge and dogs which I had kept with me. Even so
great a load would not be too much for one of the huge planes built to
our especial orders for heavy machinery transportation. At intervals I
still tried to reach Lake with the wireless, but all to no purpose.
      Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30;
and reported a quiet flight from several points on the wing. They
arrived at our base at midnight, and all hands at once discussed the
next move. It was risky business sailing over the antarctic in a single
aroplane without any line of bases, but no one drew back from what
seemed like the plainest necessity. We turned in at two o?clock for a
brief rest after some preliminary loading of the plane, but were up
again in four hours to finish the loading and packing.
      At 7:15 A.M., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under
McTighe?s pilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food
supply, and other items including the plane?s wireless outfit. The
atmosphere was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature;
and we anticipated very little trouble in reaching the latitude and
longitude designated by Lake as the site of his camp. Our apprehensions
were over what we might find, or fail to find, at the end of our
journey; for silence continued to answer all calls despatched to the camp.
      Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into
my recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my
loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the
normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external
Nature and Nature?s laws. Thenceforward the ten of us?but the student
Danforth and myself above all others?were to face a hideously amplified
world of lurking horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and
which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could.
The newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plane;
telling of our non-stop course, our two battles with treacherous
upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had sunk
his mid-journey shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of
those strange fluffy snow-cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as
rolling in the wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau. There
came a point, though, when our sensations could not be conveyed in any
words the press would understand; and a later point when we had to adopt
an actual rule of strict censorship.
      The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witch-like
cones and pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows
of the great cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in
gaining prominence; hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off,
and visible only because of their abnormal height. Little by little,
however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to
distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the
curious sense of phantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish
antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent
ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent,
pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation; as if
these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway
into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time,
space, and ultra-dimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were
evil things?mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over
some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous
cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal
/beyondness/ far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling
reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and
aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
      It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious
regularities of the higher mountain skyline?regularities like clinging
fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages,
and which indeed justified his comparison with the dream-like
suggestions of primordial temple-ruins on cloudy Asian mountain-tops so
subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There was indeed something
hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of
mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught sight
of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of
uneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances; of how
disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau
of Leng in the primal writings. Mythologists have placed Leng in Central
Asia; but the racial memory of man?or of his predecessors?is long, and
it may well be that certain tales have come down from lands and
mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and earlier than any
human world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a
pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and
have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind
as Tsathoggua itself. Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood,
was not a region I would care to be in or near; nor did I relish the
proximity of a world that had ever bred such ambiguous and Archaean
monstrosities as those Lake had just mentioned. At the moment I felt
sorry that I had ever read the abhorred /Necronomicon,/ or talked so
much with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the university.
      This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the
bizarre mirage which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent
zenith as we drew near the mountains and began to make out the
cumulative undulations of the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar
mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and
fantastically vivid as the present sample; but this one had a wholly
novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the
seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out
of the troubled ice-vapours above our heads.
      The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known
to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black
masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and
attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. There were
truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall
cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped
with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs; and strange, beetling,
table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular
slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping
the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or
surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids,
and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of
these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges
crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied
scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer
giganticism. The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the
wilder forms observed and drawn by the Arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820;
but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks
soaring stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our
minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of
our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity
and infinitely evil portent.
      I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the
process the various nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted
temporary forms of even vaster hideousness. As the whole illusion
dissolved to churning opalescence we began to look earthward again, and
saw that our journey?s end was not far off. The unknown mountains ahead
rose dizzyingly up like a fearsome rampart of giants, their curious
regularities shewing with startling clearness even without a
field-glass. We were over the lowest foothills now, and could see amidst
the snow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau a couple of
darkish spots which we took to be Lake?s camp and boring. The higher
foothills shot up between five and six miles away, forming a range
almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than Himalayan peaks
beyond them. At length Ropes?the student who had relieved McTighe at the
controls?began to head downward toward the left-hand dark spot whose
size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe sent out the last
uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our expedition.
      Everyone, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins
of the rest of our antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we
sent a guarded report of the tragedy we found, and reluctantly announced
the wiping out of the whole Lake party by the frightful wind of the
preceding day, or of the night before that. Eleven known dead, young
Gedney missing. People pardoned our hazy lack of details through
realisation of the shock the sad event must have caused us, and believed
us when we explained that the mangling action of the wind had rendered
all eleven bodies unsuitable for transportation outside. Indeed, I
flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress, utter
bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the
truth in any specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in what
we dared not tell?what I would not tell now but for the need of warning
others off from nameless terrors.
      It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc. Whether all
could have lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely
open to doubt. The storm, with its fury of madly driven ice-particles,
must have been beyond anything our expedition had encountered before.
One aroplane shelter?all, it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy
and inadequate state?was nearly pulverised; and the derrick at the
distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces. The exposed metal of the
grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruised into a high polish,
and two of the small tents were flattened despite their snow banking.
Wooden surfaces left out in the blast were pitted and denuded of paint,
and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated. It is
also true that we found none of the Archaean biological objects in a
condition to take outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals from a
vast tumbled pile, including several of the greenish soapstone fragments
whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots
caused so many doubtful comparisons; and some fossil bones, among which
were the most typical of the curiously injured specimens.
      None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow enclosure
near the camp being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done
that, though the greater breakage on the side next the camp, which was
not the windward one, suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic
beasts themselves. All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to
explain that the wind may have blown them off into the unknown. The
drill and ice-melting machinery at the boring were too badly damaged to
warrant salvage, so we used them to choke up that subtly disturbing
gateway to the past which Lake had blasted. We likewise left at the camp
the two most shaken-up of the planes; since our surviving party had only
four real pilots?Sherman, Danforth, McTighe, and Ropes?in all, with
Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate. We brought back all the
books, scientific equipment, and other incidentals we could find, though
much was rather unaccountably blown away. Spare tents and furs were
either missing or badly out of condition.
      It was approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane cruising had forced
us to give Gedney up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the
/Arkham/ for relaying; and I think we did well to keep it as calm and
non-committal as we succeeded in doing. The most we said about agitation
concerned our dogs, whose frantic uneasiness near the biological
specimens was to be expected from poor Lake?s accounts. We did not
mention, I think, their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing
around the queer greenish soapstones and certain other objects in the
disordered region; objects including scientific instruments, aroplanes,
and machinery both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had been
loosened, moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have
harboured singular curiosity and investigativeness.
      About the fourteen biological specimens we were pardonably
indefinite. We said that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but
that enough was left of them to prove Lake?s description wholly and
impressively accurate. It was hard work keeping our personal emotions
out of this matter?and we did not mention numbers or say exactly how we
had found those which we did find. We had by that time agreed not to
transmit anything suggesting madness on the part of Lake?s men, and it
surely looked like madness to find six imperfect monstrosities carefully
buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds
punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly like those on the
queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The
eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to have been completely
blown away.
      We were careful, too, about the public?s general peace of mind;
hence Danforth and I said little about that frightful trip over the
mountains the next day. It was the fact that only a radically lightened
plane could possibly cross a range of such height which mercifully
limited that scouting tour to the two of us. On our return at 1 A.M.
Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff upper lip.
It took no persuasion to make him promise not to shew our sketches and
the other things we brought away in our pockets, not to say anything
more to the others than what we had agreed to relay outside, and to hide
our camera films for private development later on; so that part of my
present story will be as new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman, and
the rest as it will be to the world in general. Indeed?Danforth is
closer mouthed than I; for he saw?or thinks he saw?one thing he will not
tell even me.
      As all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent; a
confirmation of Lake?s opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean
slate and other very primal crumpled strata unchanged since at least
middle Comanchian times; a conventional comment on the regularity of the
clinging cube and rampart formations; a decision that the cave-mouths
indicate dissolved calcareous veins; a conjecture that certain slopes
and passes would permit of the scaling and crossing of the entire range
by seasoned mountaineers; and a remark that the mysterious other side
holds a lofty and immense super-plateau as ancient and unchanging as the
mountains themselves?20,000 feet in elevation, with grotesque rock
formations protruding through a thin glacial layer and with low gradual
foothills between the general plateau surface and the sheer precipices
of the highest peaks.
      This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and
it completely satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of
sixteen hours?a longer time than our announced flying, landing,
reconnoitring, and rock-collecting programme called for?to a long
mythical spell of adverse wind conditions; and told truly of our landing
on the farther foothills. Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and
prosaic enough not to tempt any of the others into emulating our flight.
Had any tried to do that, I would have used every ounce of my persuasion
to stop them?and I do not know what Danforth would have done. While we
were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson had worked
like beavers over Lake?s two best planes; fitting them again for use
despite the altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism.
      We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back
for our old base as soon as possible. Even though indirect, that was the
safest way to work toward McMurdo Sound; for a straight-line flight
across the most utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-dead continent
would involve many additional hazards. Further exploration was hardly
feasible in view of our tragic decimation and the ruin of our drilling
machinery; and the doubts and horrors around us?which we did not
reveal?made us wish only to escape from this austral world of desolation
and brooding madness as swiftly as we could.
      As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished
without further disasters. All planes reached the old base on the
evening of the next day?January 27th?after a swift non-stop flight; and
on the 28th we made McMurdo Sound in two laps, the one pause being very
brief, and occasioned by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the
ice-shelf after we had cleared the great plateau. In five days more the
/Arkham/ and /Miskatonic/, with all hands and equipment on board, were
shaking clear of the thickening field ice and working up Ross Sea with
the mocking mountains of Victoria Land looming westward against a
troubled antarctic sky and twisting the wind?s wails into a wide-ranged
musical piping which chilled my soul to the quick. Less than a fortnight
later we left the last hint of polar land behind us, and thanked heaven
that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death,
space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown
epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet?s scarce-cooled
crust.
      Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage
antarctic exploration, and have kept certain doubts and guesses to
ourselves with splendid unity and faithfulness. Even young Danforth,
with his nervous breakdown, has not flinched or babbled to his
doctors?indeed, as I have said, there is one thing he thinks he alone
saw which he will not tell even me, though I think it would help his
psychological state if he would consent to do so. It might explain and
relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no more than the delusive
aftermath of an earlier shock. That is the impression I gather after
those rare irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to
me?things which he repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on
himself again.
      It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south,
and some of our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring
notice. We might have known from the first that human curiosity is
undying, and that the results we announced would be enough to spur
others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown. Lake?s reports
of those biological monstrosities had aroused naturalists and
palaeontologists to the highest pitch; though we were sensible enough
not to shew the detached parts we had taken from the actual buried
specimens, or our photographs of those specimens as they were found. We
also refrained from shewing the more puzzling of the scarred bones and
greenish soapstones; while Danforth and I have closely guarded the
pictures we took or drew on the super-plateau across the range, and the
crumpled things we smoothed, studied in terror, and brought away in our
pockets. But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organising, and with a
thoroughness far beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded,
they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and
bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must
break through all reticences at last?even about that ultimate nameless
thing beyond the mountains of madness.

IV.


It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back
to Lake?s camp and what we really found there?and to that other thing
beyond the frightful mountain wall. I am constantly tempted to shirk the
details, and to let hints stand for actual facts and ineluctable
deductions. I hope I have said enough already to let me glide briefly
over the rest; the rest, that is, of the horror at the camp. I have told
of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged
machinery, the varied uneasinesses of our dogs, the missing sledges and
other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of Gedney, and the
six insanely buried biological specimens, strangely sound in texture for
all their structural injuries, from a world forty million years dead. I
do not recall whether I mentioned that upon checking up the canine
bodies we found one dog missing. We did not think much about that till
later?indeed, only Danforth and I have thought of it at all.
      The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the
bodies, and to certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous
and incredible kind of rationale to the apparent chaos. At the time I
tried to keep the men?s minds off those points; for it was so much
simpler?so much more normal?to lay everything to an outbreak of madness
on the part of some of Lake?s party. From the look of things, that
daemon mountain wind must have been enough to drive any man mad in the
midst of this centre of all earthly mystery and desolation.
      The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the
bodies?men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of
conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether
inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each case
come from strangulation or laceration. The dogs had evidently started
the trouble, for the state of their ill-built corral bore witness to its
forcible breakage from within. It had been set some distance from the
camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean
organisms, but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain. When
left alone in that monstrous wind behind flimsy walls of insufficient
height they must have stampeded?whether from the wind itself, or from
some subtle, increasing odour emitted by the nightmare specimens, one
could not say. Those specimens, of course, had been covered with a
tent-cloth; yet the low antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth,
and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended to make the strangely
sound and tough tissues of the things relax and expand. Perhaps the wind
had whipped the cloth from over them, and jostled them about in such a
way that their more pungent olfactory qualities became manifest despite
their unbelievable antiquity.
      But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough.
Perhaps I had better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at
last?though with a categorical statement of opinion, based on the
first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and
myself, that the then missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the
loathsome horrors we found. I have said that the bodies were frightfully
mangled. Now I must add that some were incised and subtracted from in
the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was the same
with dogs and men. All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or
bipedal, had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed,
as by a careful butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of
salt?taken from the ravaged provision-chests on the planes?which
conjured up the most horrible associations. The thing had occurred in
one of the crude aroplane shelters from which the plane had been
dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced all tracks which could
have supplied any plausible theory. Scattered bits of clothing, roughly
slashed from the human incision-subjects, hinted no clues. It is useless
to bring up the half-impression of certain faint snow-prints in one
shielded corner of the ruined enclosure?because that impression did not
concern human prints at all, but was clearly mixed up with all the talk
of fossil prints which poor Lake had been giving throughout the
preceding weeks. One had to be careful of one?s imagination in the lee
of those overshadowing mountains of madness.
      As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing
in the end. When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs
and two men; but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent, which we entered
after investigating the monstrous graves, had something to reveal. It
was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the primal
monstrosity had been removed from the improvised table. Indeed, we had
already realised that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried
things we had found?the one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful
odour?must represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake had
tried to analyse. On and around that laboratory table were strown other
things, and it did not take long for us to guess that those things were
the carefully though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and
one dog. I shall spare the feelings of survivors by omitting mention of
the man?s identity. Lake?s anatomical instruments were missing, but
there were evidences of their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was
also gone, though around it we found a curious litter of matches. We
buried the human parts beside the other ten men, and the canine parts
with the other 35 dogs. Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory
table, and on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated books scattered
near it, we were much too bewildered to speculate.
      This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were
equally perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight
uninjured biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain
instruments, illustrated technical and scientific books, writing
materials, electric torches and batteries, food and fuel, heating
apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like, was utterly beyond sane
conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink-blots on certain
pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien fumbling and
experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices both
at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly
disordered machinery. Then, too, there was the upsetting of the larder,
the disappearance of certain staples, and the jarringly comical heap of
tin cans pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely
places. The profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or spent,
formed another minor enigma; as did the two or three tent-cloths and fur
suits which we found lying about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings
conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations. The
maltreatment of the human and canine bodies, and the crazy burial of the
damaged Archaean specimens, were all of a piece with this apparent
disintegrative madness. In view of just such an eventuality as the
present one, we carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane
disorder at the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress our pleas
against the departure of the proposed Starkweather-Moore Expedition.
      Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to
photograph and open the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow
mounds. We could not help noticing the resemblance of these monstrous
mounds, with their clusters of grouped dots, to poor Lake?s descriptions
of the strange greenish soapstones; and when we came on some of the
soapstones themselves in the great mineral pile we found the likeness
very close indeed. The whole general formation, it must be made clear,
seemed abominably suggestive of the starfish-head of the Archaean
entities; and we agreed that the suggestion must have worked potently
upon the sensitised minds of Lake?s overwrought party. Our own first
sight of the actual buried entities formed a horrible moment, and sent
the imaginations of Pabodie and myself back to some of the shocking
primal myths we had read and heard. We all agreed that the mere sight
and continued presence of the things must have coperated with the
oppressive polar solitude and daemon mountain wind in driving Lake?s
party mad.
      For madness?centring in Gedney as the only possible surviving
agent?was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as
spoken utterance was concerned; though I will not be so naive as to deny
that each of us may have harboured wild guesses which sanity forbade him
to formulate completely. Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an
exhaustive aroplane 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 arial camera and geologist?s outfit,
beginning the following morning. It was decided that Danforth and I try
it first, and we awaked at 7 A.M. intending an early trip; though heavy
winds?mentioned in our brief bulletin to the outside world?delayed our
start till nearly nine o?clock.
      I have already repeated the non-committal story we told the men at
camp?and relayed outside?after our return sixteen hours later. It is now
my terrible duty to amplify this account by filling in the merciful
blanks with hints of what we really saw in the hidden trans-montane
world?hints of the revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a
nervous collapse. I wish he would add a really frank word about the
thing which he thinks he alone saw?even though it was probably a nervous
delusion?and which was perhaps the last straw that put him where he is;
but he is firm against that. All I can do is to repeat his later
disjointed whispers about what set him shrieking as the plane soared
back through the wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and
tangible shock which I shared. This will form my last word. If the plain
signs of surviving elder horrors in what I disclose be not enough to
keep others from meddling with the inner antarctic?or at least from
prying too deeply beneath the surface of that ultimate waste of
forbidden secrets and unhuman, aeon-cursed desolation?the responsibility
for unnamable and perhaps immensurable evils will not be mine.
      Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his
afternoon flight and checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the
lowest available pass in the range lay somewhat to the right of us,
within sight of camp, and about 23,000 or 24,000 feet above sea-level.
For this point, then, we first headed in the lightened plane as we
embarked on our flight of discovery. The camp itself, on foothills which
sprang from a high continental plateau, was some 12,000 feet in
altitude; hence the actual height increase necessary was not so vast as
it might seem. Nevertheless we were acutely conscious of the rarefied
air and intense cold as we rose; for on account of visibility conditions
we had to leave the cabin windows open. We were dressed, of course, in
our heaviest furs.
      As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the
line of crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more
and more the curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and
thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. The
ancient and wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all of Lake?s
bulletins, and proved that these hoary pinnacles had been towering up in
exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in earth?s
history?perhaps over fifty million years. How much higher they had once
been, it was futile to guess; but everything about this strange region
pointed to obscure atmospheric influences unfavourable to change, and
calculated to retard the usual climatic processes of rock disintegration.
      But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and
cave-mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with
a field-glass and took arial photographs whilst Danforth drove; and at
times relieved him at the controls?though my aviation knowledge was
purely an amateur?s?in order to let him use the binoculars. We could
easily see that much of the material of the things was a lightish
Archaean quartzite, unlike any formation visible over broad areas of the
general surface; and that their regularity was extreme and uncanny to an
extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted.
      As he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold
aeons of savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough
material had saved them from obliteration. Many parts, especially those
closest to the slopes, seemed identical in substance with the
surrounding rock surface. The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of
Machu Picchu in the Andes, or the primal foundation-walls of Kish as dug
up by the Oxford?Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and
I obtained that occasional impression of /separate Cyclopean blocks/
which Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll. How to
account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt
queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange
regularities?like the famous Giants? Causeway in Ireland?but this
stupendous range, despite Lake?s original suspicion of smoking cones,
was above all else non-volcanic in evident structure.
      The curious cave-mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most
abundant, presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their
regularity of outline. They were, as Lake?s bulletin had said, often
approximately square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had
been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand. Their numerousness
and wide distribution were remarkable, and suggested that the whole
region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata.
Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within the caverns, but
we saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites.
Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures
seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the
slight cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual
patterns. Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered
at the camp, he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those
baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones,
so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above those
six buried monstrosities.
      We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and
along toward the relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we
occasionally looked down at the snow and ice of the land route,
wondering whether we could have attempted the trip with the simpler
equipment of earlier days. Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the
terrain was far from difficult as such things go; and that despite the
crevasses and other bad spots it would not have been likely to deter the
sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers
appeared to lead up to wind-bared passes with unusual continuity, and
upon reaching our chosen pass we found that its case formed no exception.
      Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the
crest and peer out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on
paper; even though we had no cause to think the regions beyond the range
essentially different from those already seen and traversed. The touch
of evil mystery in these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of
opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and
attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words. Rather was it an
affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association?a
thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths
lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes. Even the wind?s burden held a
peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and for a second it seemed that
the composite sound included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over
a wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and
resonant cave-mouths. There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion
in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark
impressions.
      We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of 23,570 feet
according to the aneroid; and had left the region of clinging snow
definitely below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes and the
start of rough-ribbed glaciers?but with those provocative cubes,
ramparts, and echoing cave-mouths to add a portent of the unnatural, the
fantastic, and the dream-like. Looking along the line of high peaks, I
thought I could see the one mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart
exactly on top. It seemed to be half-lost in a queer antarctic haze;
such a haze, perhaps, as had been responsible for Lake?s early notion of
volcanism. The pass loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept
between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a sky
fretted with swirling vapours and lighted by the low polar sun?the sky
of that mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had
ever gazed.
      A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm.
Danforth and I, unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling,
piping wind that raced through the pass and added to the noise of the
unmuffled engines, exchanged eloquent glances. And then, having gained
those last few feet, we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and
over the unsampled secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth.

V.


I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder,
terror, and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass
and saw what lay beyond. Of course we must have had some natural theory
in the back of our heads to steady our faculties for the moment.
Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones
of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the fantastically symmetrical
wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps we even half thought
the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on first
approaching those mountains of madness. We must have had some such
normal notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless,
tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of
colossal, regular, and geometrically eurhythmic stone masses which
reared their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more
than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest, and in places obviously
thinner.
      The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some
fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset.
Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully 20,000 feet high, and in a
climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than 500,000
years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision?s limit a tangle of
orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defence could
possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause. We had
previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any
theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than
natural in origin. How could they be otherwise, when man himself could
scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time when
this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial death?
      Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this
Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which
cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous
city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That
damnable portent had had a material basis after all?there had been some
horizontal stratum of ice-dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone
survival had projected its image across the mountains according to the
simple laws of reflection. Of course the phantom had been twisted and
exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did not
contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more
hideous and menacing than its distant image.
      Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone
towers and ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter
annihilation in the hundreds of thousands?perhaps millions?of years it
had brooded there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland. ?Corona
Mundi . . . Roof of the World . . .? All sorts of fantastic phrases
sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily down at the unbelievable
spectacle. I thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so
persistently haunted me since my first sight of this dead antarctic
world?of the daemoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or Abominable
Snow-Men of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their
pre-human implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of the /Necronomicon,/ and
of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than
formless star-spawn associated with that semi-entity.
      For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off
with very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right
and left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it
from the actual mountain rim, we decided that we could see no thinning
at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which
we had come. We had merely struck, at random, a limited part of
something of incalculable extent. The foothills were more sparsely
sprinkled with grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible city to
the already familiar cubes and ramparts which evidently formed its
mountain outposts. These latter, as well as the queer cave-mouths, were
as thick on the inner as on the outer sides of the mountains.
      The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of
walls from 10 to 150 feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness
varying from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious
blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone?blocks in many
cases as large as 4  6  8 feet?though in several places it seemed to
be carved out of a solid, uneven bed-rock of pre-Cambrian slate. The
buildings were far from equal in size; there being innumerable
honeycomb-arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate
structures. The general shape of these things tended to be conical,
pyramidal, or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders,
perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a
peculiar sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan
roughly suggested modern fortifications. The builders had made constant
and expert use of the principle of the arch, and domes had probably
existed in the city?s heyday.
      The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial
surface from which the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks
and immemorial debris. Where the glaciation was transparent we could see
the lower parts of the gigantic piles, and noticed the ice-preserved
stone bridges which connected the different towers at varying distances
above the ground. On the exposed walls we could detect the scarred
places where other and higher bridges of the same sort had existed.
Closer inspection revealed countless largish windows; some of which were
closed with shutters of a petrified material originally wood, though
most gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion. Many of the ruins,
of course, were roofless, and with uneven though wind-rounded upper
edges; whilst others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model or
else protected by higher surrounding structures, preserved intact
outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and pitting. With the
field-glass we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural
decorations in horizontal bands?decorations including those curious
groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones now assumed a
vastly larger significance.
      In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice-sheet
deeply riven from various geologic causes. In other places the stonework
was worn down to the very level of the glaciation. One broad swath,
extending from the plateau?s interior to a cleft in the foothills about
a mile to the left of the pass we had traversed, was wholly free from
buildings; and probably represented, we concluded, the course of some
great river which in Tertiary times?millions of years ago?had poured
through the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of the
great barrier range. Certainly, this was above all a region of caves,
gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human penetration.
      Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at
viewing this monstrous survival from aeons we had thought pre-human, I
can only wonder that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium which we
did. Of course we knew that something?chronology, scientific theory, or
our own consciousness?was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to
guide the plane, observe many things quite minutely, and take a careful
series of photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good
stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above
all my bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant
curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret?to know what sort of
beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what
relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a
concentration of life could have had.
      For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the
primary nucleus and centre of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of
earth?s history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the
most obscure and distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos
of terrene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled
out of apedom. Here sprawled a palaeogean megalopolis compared with
which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and
Olatho in the land of Lomar are recent things of today?not even of
yesterday; a megalopolis ranking with such whispered pre-human
blasphemies as Valusia, R?lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless
City of Arabia Deserta. As we flew above that tangle of stark titan
towers my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly
in realms of fantastic associations?even weaving links betwixt this lost
world and some of my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the
camp.
      The plane?s fuel-tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had
been only partly filled; hence we now had to exert caution in our
explorations. Even so, however, we covered an enormous extent of
ground?or rather, air?after swooping down to a level where the wind
became virtually negligible. There seemed to be no limit to the
mountain-range, or to the length of the frightful stone city which
bordered its inner foothills. Fifty miles of flight in each direction
shewed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed
up corpse-like through the eternal ice. There were, though, some highly
absorbing diversifications; such as the carvings on the canyon where
that broad river had once pierced the foothills and approached its
sinking-place in the great range. The headlands at the stream?s entrance
had been boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons; and something about the
ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and
confusing semi-remembrances in both Danforth and me.
      We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently
public squares; and noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a
sharp hill rose, it was generally hollowed out into some sort of
rambling stone edifice; but there were at least two exceptions. Of these
latter, one was too badly weathered to disclose what had been on the
jutting eminence, while the other still bore a fantastic conical
monument carved out of the solid rock and roughly resembling such things
as the well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra.
      Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was
not of infinite width, even though its length along the foothills seemed
endless. After about thirty miles the grotesque stone buildings began to
thin out, and in ten more miles we came to an unbroken waste virtually
without signs of sentient artifice. The course of the river beyond the
city seemed marked by a broad depressed line; while the land assumed a
somewhat greater ruggedness, seeming to slope slightly upward as it
receded in the mist-hazed west.
      So far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an
attempt at entering some of the monstrous structures would have been
inconceivable. Accordingly we decided to find a smooth place on the
foothills near our navigable pass, there grounding the plane and
preparing to do some exploration on foot. Though these gradual slopes
were partly covered with a scattering of ruins, low flying soon
disclosed an ample number of possible landing-places. Selecting that
nearest to the pass, since our next flight would be across the great
range and back to camp, we succeeded about 12:30 P.M. in coming down on
a smooth, hard snowfield wholly devoid of obstacles and well adapted to
a swift and favourable takeoff later on.
      It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking
for so brief a time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at
this level; hence we merely saw that the landing skis were safely
lodged, and that the vital parts of the mechanism were guarded against
the cold. For our foot journey we discarded the heaviest of our flying
furs, and took with us a small outfit consisting of pocket compass, hand
camera, light provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper, geologist?s
hammer and chisel, specimen-bags, coil of climbing rope, and powerful
electric torches with extra batteries; this equipment having been
carried in the plane on the chance that we might be able to effect a
landing, take ground pictures, make drawings and topographical sketches,
and obtain rock specimens from some bare slope, outcropping, or mountain
cave. Fortunately we had a supply of extra paper to tear up, place in a
spare specimen-bag, and use on the ancient principle of hare-and-hounds
for marking our course in any interior mazes we might be able to
penetrate. This had been brought in case we found some cave system with
air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the
usual rock-chipping method of trail-blazing.
      Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the
stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we
felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on
approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously. True, we
had become visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by the
barrier peaks; yet the prospect of actually entering primordial walls
reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years ago?before any
known race of men could have existed?was none the less awesome and
potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality. Though
the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion
somewhat more difficult than usual; both Danforth and I found ourselves
bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fall
to our lot. It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin
worn level with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was
a huge roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed
outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet. For
this latter we headed; and when at last we were able actually to touch
its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an
unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally
closed to our species.
      This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps 300 feet from point
to point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size,
averaging 6  8 feet in surface. There was a row of arched loopholes or
windows about four feet wide and five feet high; spaced quite
symmetrically along the points of the star and at its inner angles, and
with the bottoms about four feet from the glaciated surface. Looking
through these, we could see that the masonry was fully five feet thick,
that there were no partitions remaining within, and that there were
traces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior walls; facts we
had indeed guessed before, when flying low over this rampart and others
like it. Though lower parts must have originally existed, all traces of
such things were now wholly obscured by the deep layer of ice and snow
at this point.
      We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher
the nearly effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the
glaciated floor. Our orientation flights had indicated that many
buildings in the city proper were less ice-choked, and that we might
perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading down to the true ground
level if we entered those structures still roofed at the top. Before we
left the rampart we photographed it carefully, and studied its
mortarless Cyclopean masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished that
Pabodie were present, for his engineering knowledge might have helped us
guess how such titanic blocks could have been handled in that
unbelievably remote age when the city and its outskirts were built up.
      The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper
wind shrieking vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the
background, was something whose smallest details will always remain
engraved on my mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any human beings
but Danforth and me conceive such optical effects. Between us and the
churning vapours of the west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone
towers; its outr and incredible forms impressing us afresh at every new
angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid stone, and were it not for the
photographs I would still doubt that such a thing could be. The general
type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart we had examined;
but the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban
manifestations were past all description.
      Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its
infinite bizarrerie, endless variety, preternatural massiveness, and
utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical forms for which an
Euclid could scarcely find a name?cones of all degrees of irregularity
and truncation; terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion;
shafts with odd bulbous enlargements; broken columns in curious groups;
and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness. As we
drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the
ice-sheet, and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that connected
the crazily sprinkled structures at various heights. Of orderly streets
there seemed to be none, the only broad open swath being a mile to the
left, where the ancient river had doubtless flowed through the town into
the mountains.
      Our field-glasses shewed the external horizontal bands of nearly
effaced sculptures and dot-groups to be very prevalent, and we could
half imagine what the city must once have looked like?even though most
of the roofs and tower-tops had necessarily perished. As a whole, it had
been a complex tangle of twisted lanes and alleys; all of them deep
canyons, and some little better than tunnels because of the overhanging
masonry or overarching bridges. Now, outspread below us, it loomed like
a dream-phantasy against a westward mist through whose northern end the
low, reddish antarctic sun of early afternoon was struggling to shine;
and when for a moment that sun encountered a denser obstruction and
plunged the scene into temporary shadow, the effect was subtly menacing
in a way I can never hope to depict. Even the faint howling and piping
of the unfelt wind in the great mountain passes behind us took on a
wilder note of purposeful malignity. The last stage of our descent to
the town was unusually steep and abrupt, and a rock outcropping at the
edge where the grade changed led us to think that an artificial terrace
had once existed there. Under the glaciation, we believed, there must be
a flight of steps or its equivalent.
      When at last we plunged into the labyrinthine town itself,
clambering over fallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive
nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls,
our sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount of
self-control we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began making
some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the
camp?which I resented all the more because I could not help sharing
certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid
survival from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his
imagination, too; for in one place?where a debris-littered alley turned
a sharp corner?he insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings
which he did not like; whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle
imaginary sound from some undefined point?a muffled musical piping, he
said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves yet somehow
disturbingly different. The ceaseless /five-pointedness/ of the
surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques
had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape; and gave us a
touch of terrible subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities
which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place.
      Nevertheless our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly
dead; and we mechanically carried out our programme of chipping
specimens from all the different rock types represented in the masonry.
We wished a rather full set in order to draw better conclusions
regarding the age of the place. Nothing in the great outer walls seemed
to date from later than the Jurassic and Comanchian periods, nor was any
piece of stone in the entire place of a greater recency than the
Pliocene age. In stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a death which
had reigned at least 500,000 years, and in all probability even longer.
      As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we
stopped at all available apertures to study interiors and investigate
entrance possibilities. Some were above our reach, whilst others led
only into ice-choked ruins as unroofed and barren as the rampart on the
hill. One, though spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly
bottomless abyss without visible means of descent. Now and then we had a
chance to study the petrified wood of a surviving shutter, and were
impressed by the fabulous antiquity implied in the still discernible
grain. These things had come from Mesozoic gymnosperms and
conifers?especially Cretaceous cycads?and from fan-palms and early
angiosperms of plainly Tertiary date. Nothing definitely later than the
Pliocene could be discovered. In the placing of these shutters?whose
edges shewed the former presence of queer and long-vanished hinges?usage
seemed to be varied; some being on the outer and some on the inner side
of the deep embrasures. They seemed to have become wedged in place, thus
surviving the rusting of their former and probably metallic fixtures and
fastenings.
      After a time we came across a row of windows?in the bulges of a
colossal five-ridged cone of undamaged apex?which led into a vast,
well-preserved room with stone flooring; but these were too high in the
room to permit of descent without a rope. We had a rope with us, but did
not wish to bother with this twenty-foot drop unless obliged
to?especially in this thin plateau air where great demands were made
upon the heart action. This enormous room was probably a hall or
concourse of some sort, and our electric torches shewed bold, distinct,
and potentially startling sculptures arranged round the walls in broad,
horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips of conventional
arabesques. We took careful note of this spot, planning to enter here
unless a more easily gained interior were encountered.
      Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished;
an archway about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end
of an arial bridge which had spanned an alley about five feet above the
present level of glaciation. These archways, of course, were flush with
upper-story floors; and in this case one of the floors still existed.
The building thus accessible was a series of rectangular terraces on our
left facing westward. That across the alley, where the other archway
yawned, was a decrepit cylinder with no windows and with a curious bulge
about ten feet above the aperture. It was totally dark inside, and the
archway seemed to open on a well of illimitable emptiness.
      Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building
doubly easy, yet for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of
the long-wished chance. For though we had penetrated into this tangle of
archaic mystery, it required fresh resolution to carry us actually
inside a complete and surviving building of a fabulous elder world whose
nature was becoming more and more hideously plain to us. In the end,
however, we made the plunge; and scrambled up over the rubble into the
gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate slabs, and seemed
to form the outlet of a long, high corridor with sculptured walls.
      Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and
realising the probable complexity of the nest of apartments within, we
decided that we must begin our system of hare-and-hound trail-blazing.
Hitherto our compasses, together with frequent glimpses of the vast
mountain-range between the towers in our rear, had been enough to
prevent our losing our way; but from now on, the artificial substitute
would be necessary. Accordingly we reduced our extra paper to shreds of
suitable size, placed these in a bag to be carried by Danforth, and
prepared to use them as economically as safety would allow. This method
would probably gain us immunity from straying, since there did not
appear to be any strong air-currents inside the primordial masonry. If
such should develop, or if our paper supply should give out, we could of
course fall back on the more secure though more tedious and retarding
method of rock-chipping.
      Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible
to guess without a trial. The close and frequent connexion of the
different buildings made it likely that we might cross from one to
another on bridges underneath the ice except where impeded by local
collapses and geologic rifts, for very little glaciation seemed to have
entered the massive constructions. Almost all the areas of transparent
ice had revealed the submerged windows as tightly shuttered, as if the
town had been left in that uniform state until the glacial sheet came to
crystallise the lower part for all succeeding time. Indeed, one gained a
curious impression that this place had been deliberately closed and
deserted in some dim, bygone aeon, rather than overwhelmed by any sudden
calamity or even gradual decay. Had the coming of the ice been foreseen,
and had a nameless population left en masse to seek a less doomed abode?
The precise physiographic conditions attending the formation of the
ice-sheet at this point would have to wait for later solution. It had
not, very plainly, been a grinding drive. Perhaps the pressure of
accumulated snows had been responsible; and perhaps some flood from the
river, or from the bursting of some ancient glacial dam in the great
range, had helped to create the special state now observable.
Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with this place.

VI.


It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our
wanderings inside that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry;
that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first
time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is
especially true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation
came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings. Our flashlight
photographs of those carvings will do much toward proving the truth of
what we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had not a
larger film supply with us. As it was, we made crude notebook sketches
of certain salient features after all our films were used up.
      The building which we had entered was one of great size and
elaborateness, and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of
that nameless geologic past. The inner partitions were less massive than
the outer walls, but on the lower levels were excellently preserved.
Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular differences in
floor levels, characterised the entire arrangement; and we should
certainly have been lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn
paper left behind us. We decided to explore the more decrepit upper
parts first of all, hence climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of
some 100 feet, to where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and
ruinously open to the polar sky. Ascent was effected over the steep,
transversely ribbed stone ramps or inclined planes which everywhere
served in lieu of stairs. The rooms we encountered were of all
imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from five-pointed stars to
triangles and perfect cubes. It might be safe to say that their general
average was about 30  30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height;
though many larger apartments existed. After thoroughly examining the
upper regions and the glacial level we descended story by story into the
submerged part, where indeed we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of
connected chambers and passages probably leading over unlimited areas
outside this particular building. The Cyclopean massiveness and
giganticism of everything about us became curiously oppressive; and
there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours,
dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional nuances of the
blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon realised from what the carvings
revealed that this monstrous city was many million years old.
      We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the
anomalous balancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the
function of the arch was clearly much relied on. The rooms we visited
were wholly bare of all portable contents, a circumstance which
sustained our belief in the city?s deliberate desertion. The prime
decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture;
which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide and
arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width
given over to geometrical arabesques. There were exceptions to this rule
of arrangement, but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often, however,
a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of dots
would be sunk along one of the arabesque bands.
      The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and
aesthetically evolved to the highest degree of civilised mastery; though
utterly alien in every detail to any known art tradition of the human
race. In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have ever seen could
approach it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal
life, were rendered with astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of
the carvings; whilst the conventional designs were marvels of skilful
intricacy. The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical
principles, and were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles
based on the quantity of five. The pictorial bands followed a highly
formalised tradition, and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective;
but had an artistic force that moved us profoundly notwithstanding the
intervening gulf of vast geologic periods. Their method of design hinged
on a singular juxtaposition of the cross-section with the
two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical psychology beyond
that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to compare
this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our
photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque
conceptions of the most daring futurists.
      The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines
whose depth on unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When
cartouches with dot-groups appeared?evidently as inscriptions in some
unknown and primordial language and alphabet?the depression of the
smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps a
half-inch more. The pictorial bands were in counter-sunk low relief,
their background being depressed about two inches from the original wall
surface. In some specimens marks of a former colouration could be
detected, though for the most part the untold aeons had disintegrated
and banished any pigments which may have been applied. The more one
studied the marvellous technique the more one admired the things.
Beneath their strict conventionalisation one could grasp the minute and
accurate observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the
very conventions themselves served to symbolise and accentuate the real
essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated. We felt,
too, that besides these recognisable excellences there were others
lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions. Certain touches here and
there gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another
mental and emotional background, and a fuller or different sensory
equipment, might have made of profound and poignant significance to us.
      The subject-matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life
of the vanished epoch of their creation, and contained a large
proportion of evident history. It is this abnormal historic-mindedness
of the primal race?a chance circumstance operating, through coincidence,
miraculously in our favour?which made the carvings so awesomely
informative to us, and which caused us to place their photography and
transcription above all other considerations. In certain rooms the
dominant arrangement was varied by the presence of maps, astronomical
charts, and other scientific designs on an enlarged scale?these things
giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the
pictorial friezes and dadoes. In hinting at what the whole revealed, I
can only hope that my account will not arouse a curiosity greater than
sane caution on the part of those who believe me at all. It would be
tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death and horror by
the very warning meant to discourage them.
      Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive
twelve-foot doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden
planks?elaborately carved and polished?of the actual shutters and doors.
All metal fixtures had long ago vanished, but some of the doors remained
in place and had to be forced aside as we progressed from room to room.
Window-frames with odd transparent panes?mostly elliptical?survived here
and there, though in no considerable quantity. There were also frequent
niches of great magnitude, generally empty, but once in a while
containing some bizarre object carved from green soapstone which was
either broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant removal. Other
apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical
facilities?heating, lighting, and the like?of a sort suggested in many
of the carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been
inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors
were also paved with such tiles, though plain stonework predominated.
      As I have said, all furniture and other moveables were absent; but
the sculptures gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once
filled these tomb-like, echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the
floors were generally thick with detritus, litter, and debris; but
farther down this condition decreased. In some of the lower chambers and
corridors there was little more than gritty dust or ancient
incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncanny air of newly swept
immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or collapses had occurred, the
lower levels were as littered as the upper ones. A central court?as in
other structures we had seen from the air?saved the inner regions from
total darkness; so that we seldom had to use our electric torches in the
upper rooms except when studying sculptured details. Below the ice-cap,
however, the twilight deepened; and in many parts of the tangled ground
level there was an approach to absolute blackness.
      To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we
penetrated this aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate a
hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and
impressions. The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the
place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to
these elements were the recent unexplained horror at the camp, and the
revelations all too soon effected by the terrible mural sculptures
around us. The moment we came upon a perfect section of carving, where
no ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it took only a brief study
to give us the hideous truth?a truth which it would be naive to claim
Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had
carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now
be no further merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had
built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when
man?s ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs
roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.
      We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and
insisted?each to himself?that the omnipresence of the five-pointed motif
meant only some cultural or religious exaltation of the Archaean natural
object which had so patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness;
as the decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those
of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those
of various savage tribes some chosen totem-animal. But this lone refuge
was now stripped from us, and we were forced to face definitely the
reason-shaking realisation which the reader of these pages has doubtless
long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in black and
white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.
      The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in
the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere
dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objects?but the builders of the
city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in rocks even then
laid down well-nigh a thousand million years . . . rocks laid down
before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of
cells . . . rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at
all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all
doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the
Pnakotic Manuscripts and the /Necronomicon/ affrightedly hint about.
They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when
earth was young?the beings whose substance an alien evolution had
shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had never bred. And to
think that only the day before Danforth and I had actually looked upon
fragments of their millennially fossilised substance . . . and that poor
Lake and his party had seen their complete outlines. . . .
      It is of course impossible for me to relate in proper order the
stages by which we picked up what we know of that monstrous chapter of
pre-human life. After the first shock of the certain revelation we had
to pause a while to recuperate, and it was fully three o?clock before we
got started on our actual tour of systematic research. The sculptures in
the building we entered were of relatively late date?perhaps two million
years ago?as checked up by geological, biological, and astronomical
features; and embodied an art which would be called decadent in
comparison with that of specimens we found in older buildings after
crossing bridges under the glacial sheet. One edifice hewn from the
solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly even fifty million
years?to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous?and contained bas-reliefs
of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one tremendous exception,
that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed, the oldest domestic
structure we traversed.
      Were it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made
public, I would refrain from telling what I found and inferred, lest I
be confined as a madman. Of course, the infinitely early parts of the
patchwork tale?representing the pre-terrestrial life of the star-headed
beings on other planets, and in other galaxies, and in other
universes?can readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those
beings themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved designs and
diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and
astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge when
they see the photographs I shall publish.
      Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more
than a fraction of any connected story; nor did we even begin to come
upon the various stages of that story in their proper order. Some of the
vast rooms were independent units so far as their designs were
concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried
through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of the maps and
diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss below even the ancient
ground level?a cavern perhaps 200 feet square and sixty feet high, which
had almost undoubtedly been an educational centre of some sort. There
were many provoking repetitions of the same material in different rooms
and buildings; since certain chapters of experience, and certain
summaries or phases of racial history, had evidently been favourites
with different decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant
versions of the same theme proved useful in settling debatable points
and filling in gaps.
      I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our
disposal. Of course, we even now have only the barest outline; and much
of that was obtained later on from a study of the photographs and
sketches we made. It may be the effect of this later study?the revived
memories and vague impressions acting in conjunction with his general
sensitiveness and with that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence
he will not reveal even to me?which has been the immediate source of
Danforth?s present breakdown. But it had to be; for we could not issue
our warning intelligently without the fullest possible information, and
the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity. Certain lingering
influences in that unknown antarctic world of disordered time and alien
natural law make it imperative that further exploration be discouraged.

VII.


The full story, so far as deciphered, will shortly appear in an official
bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only the salient
high lights in a formless, rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the
sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the
nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space?their coming, and the coming
of many other alien entities such as at certain times embark upon
spatial pioneering. They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether
on their vast membraneous wings?thus oddly confirming some curious hill
folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. They had lived
under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting
terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices
employing unknown principles of energy. Evidently their scientific and
mechanical knowledge far surpassed man?s today, though they made use of
its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of
the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of
mechanised life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its
effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness of
organisation and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able
to live on a high plane without the more specialised fruits of
artificial manufacture, and even without garments except for occasional
protection against the elements.
      It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other
purposes, that they first created earth-life?using available substances
according to long-known methods. The more elaborate experiments came
after the annihilation of various cosmic enemies. They had done the same
thing on other planets; having manufactured not only necessary foods,
but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their
tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and
thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community.
These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered
about as the ?shoggoths? in his frightful /Necronomicon,/ though even
that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the
dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb. When the
star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesised their simple food
forms and bred a good supply of shoggoths, they allowed other
cell-groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for
sundry purposes; extirpating any whose presence became troublesome.
      With the aid of the shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to
lift prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to
vast and imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose
on land. Indeed, the highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land in
other parts of the universe, and probably retained many traditions of
land construction. As we studied the architecture of all these
sculptured palaeogean cities, including that whose aeon-dead corridors
we were even then traversing, we were impressed by a curious coincidence
which we have not yet tried to explain, even to ourselves. The tops of
the buildings, which in the actual city around us had of course been
weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, were clearly displayed in the
bas-reliefs; and shewed vast clusters of needle-like spires, delicate
finials on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin,
horizontal scalloped discs capping cylindrical shafts. This was exactly
what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous mirage, cast by a dead
city whence such skyline features had been absent for thousands and tens
of thousands of years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes across the
unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached poor Lake?s
ill-fated camp.
      Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of
them migrated to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water
had continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main
head tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing
in quite the usual way?the writing accomplished with a stylus on
waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths, though
they used a curious phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out
their vision with obscure special senses operating through the prismatic
cilia on their heads?senses which rendered all the Old Ones partly
independent of light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and
writing had changed curiously during the descent, embodying certain
apparently chemical coating processes?probably to secure
phosphorescence?which the bas-reliefs could not make clear to us. The
beings moved in the sea partly by swimming?using the lateral crinoid
arms?and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles containing
the pseudo-feet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the
auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fan-like folding wings. On
land they locally used the pseudo-feet, but now and then flew to great
heights or over long distances with their wings. The many slender
tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate,
flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous cordination;
ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual
operations.
      The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the
terrific pressures of the deepest sea-bottoms appeared powerless to harm
them. Very few seemed to die at all except by violence, and their
burial-places were very limited. The fact that they covered their
vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds set up
thoughts in Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and recuperation
necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied by
means of spores?like vegetable pteridophytes as Lake had suspected?but
owing to their prodigious toughness and longevity, and consequent lack
of replacement needs, they did not encourage the large-scale development
of new prothalli except when they had new regions to colonise. The young
matured swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any standard
we can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was
highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs and
institutions which I shall describe more fully in my coming monograph.
These varied slightly according to sea or land residence, but had the
same foundations and essentials.
      Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic
substances; they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food.
They ate uncooked marine life under the sea, but cooked their viands on
land. They hunted game and raised meat herds?slaughtering with sharp
weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had
noted. They resisted all ordinary temperatures marvellously; and in
their natural state could live in water down to freezing. When the great
chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however?nearly a million years ago?the
land dwellers had to resort to special measures including artificial
heating; until at last the deadly cold appears to have driven them back
into the sea. For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legend
said, they had absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent
of eating, breathing, or heat conditions; but by the time of the great
cold they had lost track of the method. In any case they could not have
prolonged the artificial state indefinitely without harm.
      Being non-pairing and semi-vegetable in structure, the Old Ones
had no biological basis for the family phase of mammal life; but seemed
to organise large households on the principles of comfortable
space-utility and?as we deduced from the pictured occupations and
diversions of co-dwellers?congenial mental association. In furnishing
their homes they kept everything in the centre of the huge rooms,
leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. Lighting, in
the case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a device probably
electro-chemical in nature. Both on land and under water they used
curious tables, chairs, and couches like cylindrical frames?for they
rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles?and racks for the
hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books.
      Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though
no certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we
saw. There was extensive commerce, both local and between different
cities; certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed,
serving as money. Probably the smaller of the various greenish
soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such currency. Though
the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock-raising
existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also
practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent migration seemed
relatively rare except for the vast colonising movements by which the
race expanded. For personal locomotion no external aid was used; since
in land, air, and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess
excessively vast capacities for speed. Loads, however, were drawn by
beasts of burden?shoggoths under the sea, and a curious variety of
primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence.
      These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other
life-forms?animal and vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and arial?were
the products of unguided evolution acting on life-cells made by the Old
Ones but escaping beyond their radius of attention. They had been
suffered to develop unchecked because they had not come in conflict with
the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically
exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very last and most
decadent sculptures a shambling primitive mammal, used sometimes for
food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose
vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the
building of land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were
generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore
unknown to palaeontology.
      The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic
changes and convulsions of the earth?s crust was little short of
miraculous. Though few or none of their first cities seem to have
remained beyond the Archaean age, there was no interruption in their
civilisation or in the transmission of their records. Their original
place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean, and it is likely
that they came not long after the matter forming the moon was wrenched
from the neighbouring South Pacific. According to one of the sculptured
maps, the whole globe was then under water, with stone cities scattered
farther and farther from the antarctic as aeons passed. Another map
shews a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole, where it is evident
that some of the beings made experimental settlements though their main
centres were transferred to the nearest sea-bottom. Later maps, which
display this land mass as cracking and drifting, and sending certain
detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the theories of
continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly.
      With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous
events began. Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet
that was not the worst misfortune. Another race?a land race of beings
shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous pre-human
spawn of Cthulhu?soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and
precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly
back to the sea?a colossal blow in view of the increasing land
settlements. Later peace was made, and the new lands were given to the
Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands. New
land cities were founded?the greatest of them in the antarctic, for this
region of first arrival was sacred. From then on, as before, the
antarctic remained the centre of the Old Ones? civilisation, and all the
discoverable cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn were blotted out.
Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them the
frightful stone city of R?lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that the
Old Ones were again supreme on the planet except for one shadowy fear
about which they did not like to speak. At a rather later age their
cities dotted all the land and water areas of the globe?hence the
recommendation in my coming monograph that some archaeologist make
systematic borings with Pabodie?s type of apparatus in certain widely
separated regions.
      The steady trend down the ages was from water to land; a movement
encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never
wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new
difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths upon which successful
sea-life depended. With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly
confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been
lost; so that the Old Ones had to depend on the moulding of forms
already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved highly
tractable; but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and
acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a
time a formidable problem.
      They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestion of
the Old Ones, and had modelled their tough plasticity into various
useful temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modelling powers
were sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative forms
implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a
semi-stable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition
echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it. Sculptured
images of these shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and
loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous
jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles; and each averaged
about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a
constantly shifting shape and volume; throwing out temporary
developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in
imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion.
      They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle
of the Permian age, perhaps 150 million years ago, when a veritable war
of re-subjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old Ones. Pictures
of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in which the
shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a marvellously
fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old
Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbance against the rebel
entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory. Thereafter the
sculptures shewed a period in which shoggoths were tamed and broken by
armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west were tamed by
cowboys. Though during the rebellion the shoggoths had shewn an ability
to live out of water, this transition was not encouraged; since their
usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble
of their management.
      During the Jurassic age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the
form of a new invasion from outer space?this time by half-fungous,
half-crustacean creatures from a planet identifiable as the remote and
recently discovered Pluto; creatures undoubtedly the same as those
figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered
in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men. To fight these
beings the Old Ones attempted, for the first time since their terrene
advent, to sally forth again into the planetary ether; but despite all
traditional preparations found it no longer possible to leave the
earth?s atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel had
been, it was now definitely lost to the race. In the end the Mi-Go drove
the Old Ones out of all the northern lands, though they were powerless
to disturb those in the sea. Little by little the slow retreat of the
elder race to their original antarctic habitat was beginning.
      It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the
Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more
widely different from that which we know than was the substance of the
Old Ones. They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations
impossible for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally
come from even remoter gulfs of cosmic space. The Old Ones, but for
their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital properties, were strictly
material, and must have had their absolute origin within the known
space-time continuum; whereas the first sources of the other beings can
only be guessed at with bated breath. All this, of course, assuming that
the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading
foes are not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have
invented a cosmic framework to account for their occasional defeats;
since historical interest and pride obviously formed their chief
psychological element. It is significant that their annals failed to
mention many advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty cultures
and towering cities figure persistently in certain obscure legends.
      The changing state of the world through long geologic ages
appeared with startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and
scenes. In certain cases existing science will require revision, while
in other cases its bold deductions are magnificently confirmed. As I
have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all the
continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which
cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically
viscous lower surface?an hypothesis suggested by such things as the
complementary outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the
great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up?receives striking support
from this uncanny source.
      Maps evidently shewing the Carboniferous world of an hundred
million or more years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms
destined later to separate Africa from the once continuous realms of
Europe (then the Valusia of hellish primal legend), Asia, the Americas,
and the antarctic continent. Other charts?and most significantly one in
connexion with the founding fifty million years ago of the vast dead
city around us?shewed all the present continents well differentiated.
And in the latest discoverable specimen?dating perhaps from the Pliocene
age?the approximate world of today appeared quite clearly despite the
linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe through
Greenland, and of South America with the antarctic continent through
Graham Land. In the Carboniferous map the whole globe?ocean floor and
rifted land mass alike?bore symbols of the Old Ones? vast stone cities,
but in the later charts the gradual recession toward the antarctic
became very plain. The final Pliocene specimen shewed no land cities
except on the antarctic continent and the tip of South America, nor any
ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge
and interest in the northern world, save for a study of coast-lines
probably made during long exploration flights on those fan-like
membraneous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones.
      Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the
centrifugal rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or
sea-bottom, and other natural causes was a matter of common record; and
it was curious to observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as
the ages wore on. The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed
to be the last general centre of the race; built early in the Cretaceous
age after a titanic earth-buckling had obliterated a still vaster
predecessor not far distant. It appeared that this general region was
the most sacred spot of all, where reputedly the first Old Ones had
settled on a primal sea-bottom. In the new city?many of whose features
we could recognise in the sculptures, but which stretched fully an
hundred miles along the mountain-range in each direction beyond the
farthest limits of our arial survey?there were reputed to be preserved
certain sacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city, which
were thrust up to light after long epochs in the course of the general
crumpling of strata.

VIII.


Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a
peculiarly personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate
district in which we were. Of this local material there was naturally a
vast abundance; and on the tangled ground level of the city we were
lucky enough to find a house of very late date whose walls, though
somewhat damaged by a neighbouring rift, contained sculptures of
decadent workmanship carrying the story of the region much beyond the
period of the Pliocene map whence we derived our last general glimpse of
the pre-human world. This was the last place we examined in detail,
since what we found there gave us a fresh immediate objective.
      Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most
terrible of all the corners of earth?s globe. Of all existing lands it
was infinitely the most ancient; and the conviction grew upon us that
this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng
which even the mad author of the /Necronomicon/ was reluctant to
discuss. The great mountain chain was tremendously long?starting as a
low range at Luitpold Land on the coast of Weddell Sea and virtually
crossing the entire continent. The really high part stretched in a
mighty arc from about Latitude 82, E. Longitude 60 to Latitude 70, E.
Longitude 115, with its concave side toward our camp and its seaward
end in the region of that long, ice-locked coast whose hills were
glimpsed by Wilkes and Mawson at the Antarctic Circle.
      Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of Nature seemed
disturbingly close at hand. I have said that these peaks are higher than
the Himalayas, but the sculptures forbid me to say that they are earth?s
highest. That grim honour is beyond doubt reserved for something which
half the sculptures hesitated to record at all, whilst others approached
it with obvious repugnance and trepidation. It seems that there was one
part of the ancient land?the first part that ever rose from the waters
after the earth had flung off the moon and the Old Ones had seeped down
from the stars?which had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelessly
evil. Cities built there had crumbled before their time, and had been
found suddenly deserted. Then when the first great earth-buckling had
convulsed the region in the Comanchian age, a frightful line of peaks
had shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and chaos?and earth
had received her loftiest and most terrible mountains.
      If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things
must have been much over 40,000 feet high?radically vaster than even the
shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended, it
appeared, from about Latitude 77, E. Longitude 70 to Latitude 70, E.
Longitude 100?less than 300 miles away from the dead city, so that we
would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim western distance had
it not been for that vague opalescent haze. Their northern end must
likewise be visible from the long Antarctic Circle coast-line at Queen
Mary Land.
      Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange
prayers to those mountains; but none ever went near them or dared to
guess what lay beyond. No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied
the emotions conveyed in the carvings I prayed that none ever might.
There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them?Queen Mary and
Kaiser Wilhelm Lands?and I thank heaven no one has been able to land and
climb those hills. I am not as sceptical about old tales and fears as I
used to be, and I do not laugh now at the pre-human sculptor?s notion
that lightning paused meaningfully now and then at each of the brooding
crests, and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those terrible
pinnacles all through the long polar night. There may be a very real and
very monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the
Cold Waste.
      But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if
less namelessly accursed. Soon after the founding of the city the great
mountain-range became the seat of the principal temples, and many
carvings shewed what grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky
where now we saw only the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts. In the
course of ages the caves had appeared, and had been shaped into adjuncts
of the temples. With the advance of still later epochs all the limestone
veins of the region were hollowed out by ground waters, so that the
mountains, the foothills, and the plains below them were a veritable
network of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic sculptures told
of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the
Stygian sunless sea that lurked at earth?s bowels.
      This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great
river which flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward
mountains, and which had formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones?
range and flowed beside that chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd
and Totten Lands on Wilkes?s coast-line. Little by little it had eaten
away the limestone hill base at its turning, till at last its sapping
currents reached the caverns of the ground waters and joined with them
in digging a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk emptied into the
hollow hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry. Much of the
later city as we now found it had been built over that former bed. The
Old Ones, understanding what had happened, and exercising their always
keen artistic sense, had carved into ornate pylons those headlands of
the foothills where the great stream began its descent into eternal
darkness.
      This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was
plainly the one whose extinct course we had seen in our aroplane
survey. Its position in different carvings of the city helped us to
orient ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stages of the
region?s age-long, aeon-dead history; so that we were able to sketch a
hasty but careful map of the salient features?squares, important
buildings, and the like?for guidance in further explorations. We could
soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was a million
or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures told us
exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs and
landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked like. It
must have had a marvellous and mystic beauty, and as I thought of it I
almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which the
city?s inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness and
glacial twilight had choked and weighed on my spirit. Yet according to
certain carvings the denizens of that city had themselves known the
clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a sombre and recurrent type
of scene in which the Old Ones were shewn in the act of recoiling
affrightedly from some object?never allowed to appear in the
design?found in the great river and indicated as having been washed down
through waving, vine-draped cycad-forests from those horrible westward
mountains.
      It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings
that we obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the
city?s desertion. Undoubtedly there must have been many sculptures of
the same age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and
aspirations of a stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain
evidence of the existence of others came to us shortly afterward. But
this was the first and only set we directly encountered. We meant to
look farther later on; but as I have said, immediate conditions dictated
another present objective. There would, though, have been a limit?for
after all hope of a long future occupancy of the place had perished
among the Old Ones, there could not but have been a complete cessation
of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming of the
great cold which once held most of the earth in thrall, and which has
never departed from the ill-fated poles?the great cold that, at the
world?s other extremity, put an end to the fabled lands of Lomar and
Hyperborea.
      Just when this tendency began in the antarctic it would be hard to
say in terms of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the
general glacial periods at a distance of about 500,000 years from the
present, but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much
earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork; but it is
quite likely that the decadent sculptures were made considerably less
than a million years ago, and that the actual desertion of the city was
complete long before the conventional opening of the Pleistocene?500,000
years ago?as reckoned in terms of the earth?s whole surface.
      In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation
everywhere, and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old Ones.
Heating devices were shewn in the houses, and winter travellers were
represented as muffled in protective fabrics. Then we saw a series of
cartouches (the continuous band arrangement being frequently interrupted
in these late carvings) depicting a constantly growing migration to the
nearest refuges of greater warmth?some fleeing to cities under the sea
off the far-away coast, and some clambering down through networks of
limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the neighbouring black abyss of
subterrene waters.
      In the end it seems to have been the neighbouring abyss which
received the greatest colonisation. This was partly due, no doubt, to
the traditional sacredness of this especial region; but may have been
more conclusively determined by the opportunities it gave for continuing
the use of the great temples on the honeycombed mountains, and for
retaining the vast land city as a place of summer residence and base of
communication with various mines. The linkage of old and new abodes was
made more effective by means of several gradings and improvements along
the connecting routes, including the chiselling of numerous direct
tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the black abyss?sharply
down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew, according to our
most thoughtful estimates, on the guide map we were compiling. It was
obvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a reasonable
exploring distance of where we were; both being on the mountainward edge
of the city, one less than a quarter-mile toward the ancient
river-course, and the other perhaps twice that distance in the opposite
direction.
      The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain
places; but the Old Ones built their new city under water?no doubt
because of its greater certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the
hidden sea appears to have been very great, so that the earth?s internal
heat could ensure its habitability for an indefinite period. The beings
seem to have had no trouble in adapting themselves to part-time?and
eventually, of course, whole-time?residence under water; since they had
never allowed their gill systems to atrophy. There were many sculptures
which shewed how they had always frequently visited their submarine
kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually bathed on the deep
bottom of their great river. The darkness of inner earth could likewise
have been no deterrent to a race accustomed to long antarctic nights.
      Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings
had a truly epic quality where they told of the building of the new city
in the cavern sea. The Old Ones had gone about it scientifically;
quarrying insoluble rocks from the heart of the honeycombed mountains,
and employing expert workers from the nearest submarine city to perform
the construction according to the best methods. These workers brought
with them all that was necessary to establish the new
venture?shoggoth-tissue from which to breed stone-lifters and subsequent
beasts of burden for the cavern city, and other protoplasmic matter to
mould into phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes.
      At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian
sea; its architecture much like that of the city above, and its
workmanship displaying relatively little decadence because of the
precise mathematical element inherent in building operations. The newly
bred shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular intelligence, and were
represented as taking and executing orders with marvellous quickness.
They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking their voices?a
sort of musical piping over a wide range, if poor Lake?s dissection had
indicated aright?and to work more from spoken commands than from
hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times. They were, however, kept in
admirable control. The phosphorescent organisms supplied light with vast
effectiveness, and doubtless atoned for the loss of the familiar polar
auroras of the outer-world night.
      Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain
decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realise this falling off themselves;
and in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by
transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their land
city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped Greece
and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater
splendours than its own people could create. That the transfer of
sculptured blocks had not been more extensive, was doubtless owing to
the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned. By the
time total abandonment did occur?and it surely must have occurred before
the polar Pleistocene was far advanced?the Old Ones had perhaps become
satisfied with their decadent art?or had ceased to recognise the
superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent ruins
around us had certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation;
though all the best separate statues, like other moveables, had been
taken away.
      The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this story were, as I
have said, the latest we could find in our limited search. They left us
with a picture of the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land
city in summer and the sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading
with the sea-bottom cities off the antarctic coast. By this time the
ultimate doom of the land city must have been recognised, for the
sculptures shewed many signs of the cold?s malign encroachments.
Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the winter no longer
melted completely even in midsummer. The saurian livestock were nearly
all dead, and the mammals were standing it none too well. To keep on
with the work of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some
of the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant shoggoths to land life; a
thing the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river
was now lifeless, and the upper sea had lost most of its denizens except
the seals and whales. All the birds had flown away, save only the great,
grotesque penguins.
      What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the
new sea-cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in
eternal blackness? Had the subterranean waters frozen at last? To what
fate had the ocean-bottom cities of the outer world been delivered? Had
any of the Old Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice-cap?
Existing geology shews no trace of their presence. Had the frightful
Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land world of the north? Could
one be sure of what might or might not linger even to this day in the
lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth?s deepest waters? Those things
had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of pressure?and men of
the sea have fished up curious objects at times. And has the
killer-whale theory really explained the savage and mysterious scars on
antarctic seals noticed a generation ago by Borchgrevingk?
      The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses,
for their geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have
been a very early date in the land city?s history. They were, according
to their location, certainly not less than thirty million years old; and
we reflected that in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the
cavern itself, had no existence. They would have remembered an older
scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of
flourishing arts around them, and a great river sweeping northward along
the base of the mighty mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean.
      And yet we could not help thinking about these
specimens?especially about the eight perfect ones that were missing from
Lake?s hideously ravaged camp. There was something abnormal about that
whole business?the strange things we had tried so hard to lay to
somebody?s madness?those frightful graves?the amount /and nature/ of the
missing material?Gedney?the unearthly toughness of those archaic
monstrosities, and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now shewed the
race to have. . . . Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last few
hours, and were prepared to believe and keep silent about many appalling
and incredible secrets of primal Nature.

IX.


I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a
change in our immediate objective. This of course had to do with the
chiselled avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had
not known before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse. From
the evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply descending
walk of about a mile through either of the neighbouring tunnels would
bring us to the brink of the dizzy sunless cliffs above the great abyss;
down whose side adequate paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to the
rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this fabulous
gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of resistance
once we knew of the thing?yet we realised we must begin the quest at
once if we expected to include it on our present flight.
      It was now 8 P.M., and we had not enough battery replacements to
let our torches burn on forever. We had done so much of our studying and
copying below the glacial level that our battery supply had had at least
five hours of nearly continuous use; and despite the special dry cell
formula would obviously be good for only about four more?though by
keeping one torch unused, except for especially interesting or difficult
places, we might manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that. It would
not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean catacombs, hence in
order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further mural
deciphering. Of course we intended to revisit the place for days and
perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography?curiosity having long
ago got the better of horror?but just now we must hasten. Our supply of
trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant to
sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it; but we did
let one large notebook go. If worst came to worst, we could resort to
rock-chipping?and of course it would be possible, even in case of really
lost direction, to work up to full daylight by one channel or another if
granted sufficient time for plentiful trial and error. So at last we set
off eagerly in the indicated direction of the nearest tunnel.
      According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the
desired tunnel-mouth could not be much more than a quarter-mile from
where we stood; the intervening space shewing solid-looking buildings
quite likely to be penetrable still at a sub-glacial level. The opening
itself would be in the basement?on the angle nearest the foothills?of a
vast five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial
nature, which we tried to identify from our arial survey of the ruins.
No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we
concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had
been totally shattered in an ice-rift we had noticed. In the latter case
the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would have
to try the next nearest one?the one less than a mile to the north. The
intervening river-course prevented our trying any of the more southerly
tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighbouring ones were
choked it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on
the next northerly one?about a mile beyond our second choice.
      As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of
map and compass?traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or
preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and
clambering down again, encountering choked doorways and piles of debris,
hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate
stretches, taking false leads and retracing our way (in such cases
removing the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while
striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight poured or
trickled down?we were repeatedly tantalised by the sculptured walls
along our route. Many must have told tales of immense historical
importance, and only the prospect of later visits reconciled us to the
need of passing them by. As it was, we slowed down once in a while and
turned on our second torch. If we had had more films we would certainly
have paused briefly to photograph certain bas-reliefs, but
time-consuming hand copying was clearly out of the question.
      I come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate,
or to hint rather than state, is very strong. It is necessary, however,
to reveal the rest in order to justify my course in discouraging further
exploration. We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of
the tunnel?s mouth?having crossed a second-story bridge to what seemed
plainly the tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor
especially rich in decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic
sculptures of late workmanship?when, about 8:30 P.M., Danforth?s keen
young nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual. If we had
had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned before. At first
we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-pure
air, but after a few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely.
Let me try to state the thing without flinching. There was an odour?and
that odour was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had
nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had
dissected.
      Of course the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it
sounds now. There were several conceivable explanations, and we did a
good deal of indecisive whispering. Most important of all, we did not
retreat without further investigation; for having come this far, we were
loath to be balked by anything short of certain disaster. Anyway, what
we must have suspected was altogether too wild to believe. Such things
did not happen in any normal world. It was probably sheer irrational
instinct which made us dim our single torch?tempted no longer by the
decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from the
oppressive walls?and which softened our progress to a cautious tiptoeing
and crawling over the increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris.
      Danforth?s eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it
was likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after
we had passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors
on the ground level. It did not look quite as it ought after countless
thousands of years of desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more
light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked
through it. The irregular nature of the litter precluded any definite
marks, but in the smoother places there were suggestions of the dragging
of heavy objects. Once we thought there was a hint of parallel tracks,
as if of runners. This was what made us pause again.
      It was during that pause that we caught?simultaneously this
time?the other odour ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful
and a more frightful odour?less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely
appalling in this place under the known circumstances . . . unless, of
course, Gedney. . . . For the odour was the plain and familiar one of
common petrol?every-day gasoline.
      Our motivation after that is something I will leave to
psychologists. We knew now that some terrible extension of the camp
horrors must have crawled into this nighted burial-place of the aeons,
hence could not doubt any longer the existence of nameless
conditions?present or at least recent?just ahead. Yet in the end we did
let sheer burning curiosity?or anxiety?or auto-hypnotism?or vague
thoughts of responsibility toward Gedney?or what not?drive us on.
Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen at the
alley-turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical
piping?potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake?s
dissection report despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes
of the windy peaks?which he thought he had shortly afterward half heard
from unknown depths below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was
left?of what had disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor
might have conceived the inconceivable?a wild trip across the monstrous
mountains and a descent into the unknown primal masonry?
      But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of
anything definite. We had turned off all light as we stood still, and
vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the
blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move ahead,
we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed
debris formed an impression we could not shake off, and the smell of
gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our
feet, until very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease. We
had been all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift
glimpsed from the air. Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not
even going to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward
aperture opened.
      The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carven walls of the
blocked corridor in which we stood, shewed several doorways in various
states of obstruction; and from one of them the gasoline odour?quite
submerging that other hint of odour?came with especial distinctness. As
we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a
slight and recent clearing away of debris from that particular opening.
Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the direct avenue
toward it was now plainly manifest. I do not think anyone will wonder
that we waited an appreciable time before making any further motion.
      And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first
impression was one of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse of
that sculptured crypt?a perfect cube with sides of about twenty
feet?there remained no recent object of instantly discernible size; so
that we looked instinctively, though in vain, for a farther doorway. In
another moment, however, Danforth?s sharp vision had descried a place
where the floor debris had been disturbed; and we turned on both torches
full strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually simple and
trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because of what it
implied. It was a rough levelling of the debris, upon which several
small objects lay carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a
considerable amount of gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to
leave a strong odour even at this extreme super-plateau altitude. In
other words, it could not be other than a sort of camp?a camp made by
questing beings who like us had been turned back by the unexpectedly
choked way to the abyss.
      Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance
was concerned, all from Lake?s camp; and consisted of tin cans as
queerly opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many spent
matches, three illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an
empty ink bottle with its pictorial and instructional carton, a broken
fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur and tent-cloth, a used
electric battery with circular of directions, a folder that came with
our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was all
bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was
on them we felt we had come to the worst. We had found certain
inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us,
yet the effect of the sight down there in the pre-human vaults of a
nightmare city was almost too much to bear.
      A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of
those found on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane
five-pointed grave-mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably
have prepared rough, hasty sketches?varying in their accuracy or lack of
it?which outlined the neighbouring parts of the city and traced the way
from a circularly represented place outside our previous route?a place
we identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast
circular gulf glimpsed in our arial survey?to the present five-pointed
structure and the tunnel-mouth therein. He might, I repeat, have
prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite obviously
compiled as our own had been from late sculptures somewhere in the
glacial labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had seen and used.
But what this art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute
those sketches in a strange and assured technique perhaps superior,
despite haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings from
which they were taken?the characteristic and unmistakable technique of
the Old Ones themselves in the dead city?s heyday.
      There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not
to flee for our lives after that; since our conclusions were
now?notwithstanding their wildness?completely fixed, and of a nature I
need not even mention to those who have read my account as far as this.
Perhaps we were mad?for have I not said those horrible peaks were
mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of the same
spirit?albeit in a less extreme form?in the men who stalk deadly beasts
through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits.
Half-paralysed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned
within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.
      Of course we did not mean to face that?or those?which we knew had
been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by
this time have found the other neighbouring entrance to the abyss, and
have passed within to whatever night-black fragments of the past might
await them in the ultimate gulf?the ultimate gulf they had never seen.
Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the
north seeking another. They were, we remembered, partly independent of
light.
      Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what
precise form our new emotions took?just what change of immediate
objective it was that so sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly
did not mean to face what we feared?yet I will not deny that we may have
had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden
vantage-point. Probably we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the
abyss itself, though there was interposed a new goal in the form of that
great circular place shewn on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had
at once recognised it as a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in the
very earliest carvings, but appearing only as a prodigious round
aperture from above. Something about the impressiveness of its
rendering, even in these hasty diagrams, made us think that its
sub-glacial levels must still form a feature of peculiar importance.
Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by us. It
was certainly of incredible age according to the sculptures in which it
figured?being indeed among the first things built in the city. Its
carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover,
it might form a good present link with the upper world?a shorter route
than the one we were so carefully blazing, and probably that by which
those others had descended.
      At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible
sketches?which quite perfectly confirmed our own?and start back over the
indicated course to the circular place; the course which our nameless
predecessors must have traversed twice before us. The other neighbouring
gate to the abyss would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our
journey?during which we continued to leave an economical trail of
paper?for it was precisely the same in kind as that by which we had
reached the cul de sac; except that it tended to adhere more closely to
the ground level and even descend to basement corridors. Every now and
then we could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter
under foot; and after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline
scent we were again faintly conscious?spasmodically?of that more hideous
and more persistent scent. After the way had branched from our former
course we sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep
along the walls; noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent
sculptures, which indeed seem to have formed a main aesthetic outlet for
the Old Ones.
      About 9:30 P.M., while traversing a vaulted corridor whose
increasingly glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and
whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight
ahead and were able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were
coming to the vast circular place, and that our distance from the upper
air could not be very great. The corridor ended in an arch surprisingly
low for these megalithic ruins, but we could see much through it even
before we emerged. Beyond there stretched a prodigious round space?fully
200 feet in diameter?strown with debris and containing many choked
archways corresponding to the one we were about to cross. The walls
were?in available spaces?boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic
proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused by
the openness of the spot, an artistic splendour far beyond anything we
had encountered before. The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated,
and we fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.
      But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp
which, eluding the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor,
wound spirally up the stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside
counterpart of those once climbing outside the monstrous towers or
ziggurats of antique Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight, and the
perspective which confounded the descent with the tower?s inner wall,
had prevented our noticing this feature from the air, and thus caused us
to seek another avenue to the sub-glacial level. Pabodie might have been
able to tell what sort of engineering held it in place, but Danforth and
I could merely admire and marvel. We could see mighty stone corbels and
pillars here and there, but what we saw seemed inadequate to the
function performed. The thing was excellently preserved up to the
present top of the tower?a highly remarkable circumstance in view of its
exposure?and its shelter had done much to protect the bizarre and
disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.
      As we stepped out into the awesome half-daylight of this monstrous
cylinder-bottom?fifty million years old, and without doubt the most
primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes?we saw that the
ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty
feet. This, we recalled from our arial survey, meant an outside
glaciation of some forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had seen from
the plane had been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot mound of
crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths of its
circumference by the massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins.
According to the sculptures the original tower had stood in the centre
of an immense circular plaza; and had been perhaps 500 or 600 feet high,
with tiers of horizontal discs near the top, and a row of needle-like
spires along the upper rim. Most of the masonry had obviously toppled
outward rather than inward?a fortunate happening, since otherwise the
ramp might have been shattered and the whole interior choked. As it was,
the ramp shewed sad battering; whilst the choking was such that all the
archways at the bottom seemed to have been recently half-cleared.
      It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the
route by which those others had descended, and that this would be the
logical route for our own ascent despite the long trail of paper we had
left elsewhere. The tower?s mouth was no farther from the foothills and
our waiting plane than was the great terraced building we had entered,
and any further sub-glacial exploration we might make on this trip would
lie in this general region. Oddly, we were still thinking about possible
later trips?even after all we had seen and guessed. Then as we picked
our way cautiously over the debris of the great floor, there came a
sight which for the time excluded all other matters.
      It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther
angle of the ramp?s lower and outward-projecting course which had
hitherto been screened from our view. There they were?the three sledges
missing from Lake?s camp?shaken by a hard usage which must have included
forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and debris, as
well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were
carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and contained things
memorably familiar enough?the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument
cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and some
bulging with less obvious contents?everything derived from Lake?s
equipment. After what we had found in that other room, we were in a
measure prepared for this encounter. The really great shock came when we
stepped over and undid one tarpaulin whose outlines had peculiarly
disquieted us. It seems that others as well as Lake had been interested
in collecting typical specimens; for there were two here, both stiffly
frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive plaster where some
wounds around the neck had occurred, and wrapped with patent care to
prevent further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the
missing dog.

X.


Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking
about the northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our sombre
discovery, and I am not prepared to say that we would have immediately
revived such thoughts but for a specific circumstance which broke in
upon us and set up a whole new train of speculations. We had replaced
the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing in a kind of mute
bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our consciousness?the first
sounds we had heard since descending out of the open where the mountain
wind whined faintly from its unearthly heights. Well known and mundane
though they were, their presence in this remote world of death was more
unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones could
possibly have been?since they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions
of cosmic harmony.
      Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide
range which Lake?s dissection report had led us to expect in those
others?and which, indeed, our overwrought fancies had been reading into
every wind-howl we had heard since coming on the camp horror?it would
have had a kind of hellish congruity with the aeon-dead region around
us. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As
it was, however, the noise shattered all our profoundly seated
adjustments?all our tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste
as utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life as the
sterile disc of the moon. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any
buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an
age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. Instead, it was a
thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarised by our sea days
off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered
to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief?it
was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.
      The muffled sound floated from sub-glacial recesses nearly
opposite to the corridor whence we had come?regions manifestly in the
direction of that other tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a
living water-bird in such a direction?in a world whose surface was one
of age-long and uniform lifelessness?could lead to only one conclusion;
hence our first thought was to verify the objective reality of the
sound. It was, indeed, repeated; and seemed at times to come from more
than one throat. Seeking its source, we entered an archway from which
much debris had been cleared; resuming our trail-blazing?with an added
paper-supply taken with curious repugnance from one of the tarpaulin
bundles on the sledges?when we left daylight behind.
      As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we
plainly discerned some curious dragging tracks; and once Danforth found
a distinct print of a sort whose description would be only too
superfluous. The course indicated by the penguin cries was precisely
what our map and compass prescribed as an approach to the more northerly
tunnel-mouth, and we were glad to find that a bridgeless thoroughfare on
the ground and basement levels seemed open. The tunnel, according to the
chart, ought to start from the basement of a large pyramidal structure
which we seemed vaguely to recall from our arial survey as remarkably
well preserved. Along our path the single torch shewed a customary
profusion of carvings, but we did not pause to examine any of these.
      Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed
on the second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our
minds from earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones,
having left their supplies in the great circular place, must have
planned to return after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss;
yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them as completely as if
they had never existed. This white, waddling thing was fully six feet
high, yet we seemed to realise at once that it was not one of those
others. They were larger and dark, and according to the sculptures their
motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the
queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the
white thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed
clutched for an instant by a primitive dread almost sharper than the
worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of
anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our left
to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones.
For it was only a penguin?albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than
the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined
albinism and virtual eyelessness.
      When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both
our torches on the indifferent and unheeding group of three we saw that
they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species.
Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the
Old Ones? sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they
were descended from the same stock?undoubtedly surviving through a
retreat to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had
destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless
slits. That their present habitat was the vast abyss we sought, was not
for a moment to be doubted; and this evidence of the gulf?s continued
warmth and habitability filled us with the most curious and subtly
perturbing fancies.
      We wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out
of their usual domain. The state and silence of the great dead city made
it clear that it had at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery,
whilst the manifest indifference of the trio to our presence made it
seem odd that any passing party of those others should have startled
them. Was it possible that those others had taken some aggressive action
or tried to increase their meat supply? We doubted whether that pungent
odour which the dogs had hated could cause an equal antipathy in these
penguins; since their ancestors had obviously lived on excellent terms
with the Old Ones?an amicable relationship which must have survived in
the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones remained. Regretting?in a
flareup of the old spirit of pure science?that we could not photograph
these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them to their squawking and
pushed on toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively proved
to us, and whose exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear.
      Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and
peculiarly sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were
approaching the tunnel-mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins,
and heard others immediately ahead. Then the corridor ended in a
prodigious open space which made us gasp involuntarily?a perfect
inverted hemisphere, obviously deep underground; fully an hundred feet
in diameter and fifty feet high, with low archways opening around all
parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning cavernously
with a black arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the vault to a
height of nearly fifteen feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss.
      In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively
though decadently carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome,
a few albino penguins waddled?aliens there, but indifferent and
unseeing. The black tunnel yawned indefinitely off at a steep descending
grade, its aperture adorned with grotesquely chiselled jambs and lintel.
From that cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air
and perhaps even a suspicion of vapour proceeded; and we wondered what
living entities other than penguins the limitless void below, and the
contiguous honeycombings of the land and the titan mountains, might
conceal. We wondered, too, whether the trace of mountain-top smoke at
first suspected by poor Lake, as well as the odd haze we had ourselves
perceived around the rampart-crowned peak, might not be caused by the
tortuous-channelled rising of some such vapour from the unfathomed
regions of earth?s core.
      Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was?at least at the
start?about fifteen feet each way; sides, floor, and arched roof
composed of the usual megalithic masonry. The sides were sparsely
decorated with cartouches of conventional designs in a late, decadent
style; and all the construction and carving were marvellously well
preserved. The floor was quite clear, except for a slight detritus
bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks of those others.
The farther one advanced, the warmer it became; so that we were soon
unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered whether there were any
actually igneous manifestations below, and whether the waters of that
sunless sea were hot. After a short distance the masonry gave place to
solid rock, though the tunnel kept the same proportions and presented
the same aspect of carved regularity. Occasionally its varying grade
became so steep that grooves were cut in the floor. Several times we
noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in our
diagrams; none of them such as to complicate the problem of our return,
and all of them welcome as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome
entities on their way back from the abyss. The nameless scent of such
things was very distinct. Doubtless it was suicidally foolish to venture
into that tunnel under the known conditions, but the lure of the
unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspect?indeed, it
was just such a lure which had brought us to this unearthly polar waste
in the first place. We saw several penguins as we passed along, and
speculated on the distance we would have to traverse. The carvings had
led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the abyss, but
our previous wanderings had shewn us that matters of scale were not
wholly to be depended on.
      After about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly
accentuated, and we kept very careful track of the various lateral
openings we passed. There was no visible vapour as at the mouth, but
this was doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air. The
temperature was rapidly ascending, and we were not surprised to come
upon a careless heap of material shudderingly familiar to us. It was
composed of furs and tent-cloth taken from Lake?s camp, and we did not
pause to study the bizarre forms into which the fabrics had been
slashed. Slightly beyond this point we noticed a decided increase in the
size and number of the side-galleries, and concluded that the densely
honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills must now have been
reached. The nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another and
scarcely less offensive odour?of what nature we could not guess, though
we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterrene fungi.
Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the carvings had
not prepared us?a broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-looking
elliptical cavern with a level floor; some 75 feet long and 50 broad,
and with many immense side-passages leading away into cryptical darkness.
      Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with
both torches suggested that it had been formed by the artificial
destruction of several walls between adjacent honeycombings. The walls
were rough, and the high vaulted roof was thick with stalactites; but
the solid rock floor had been smoothed off, and was free from all
debris, detritus, or even dust to a positively abnormal extent. Except
for the avenue through which we had come, this was true of the floors of
all the great galleries opening off from it; and the singularity of the
condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling. The curious new foetor
which had supplemented the nameless scent was excessively pungent here;
so much so that it destroyed all trace of the other. Something about
this whole place, with its polished and almost glistening floor, struck
us as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any of the monstrous
things we had previously encountered.
      The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the
larger proportion of penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion as
to the right course amidst this plethora of equally great cave-mouths.
Nevertheless we resolved to resume our paper trail-blazing if any
further complexity should develop; for dust tracks, of course, could no
longer be expected. Upon resuming our direct progress we cast a beam of
torchlight over the tunnel walls?and stopped short in amazement at the
supremely radical change which had come over the carvings in this part
of the passage. We realised, of course, the great decadence of the Old
Ones? sculpture at the time of the tunnelling; and had indeed noticed
the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us.
But now, in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden
difference wholly transcending explanation?a difference in basic nature
as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a
degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of
decline could have led one to expect it.
      This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking
in delicacy of detail. It was counter-sunk with exaggerated depth in
bands following the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the
earlier sections, but the height of the reliefs did not reach the level
of the general surface. Danforth had the idea that it was a second
carving?a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous
design. In nature it was wholly decorative and conventional; and
consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the quintile
mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seeming more like a parody
than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our
minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to
the aesthetic feeling behind the technique?an alien element, Danforth
guessed, that was responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution.
It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognise as
the Old Ones? art; and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things
as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner. That
others had recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the
presence of a used torch battery on the floor in front of one of the
most characteristic designs.
      Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study,
we resumed our advance after a cursory look; though frequently casting
beams over the walls to see if any further decorative changes developed.
Nothing of the sort was perceived, though the carvings were in places
rather sparse because of the numerous mouths of smooth-floored lateral
tunnels. We saw and heard fewer penguins, but thought we caught a vague
suspicion of an infinitely distant chorus of them somewhere deep within
the earth. The new and inexplicable odour was abominably strong, and we
could detect scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of
visible vapour ahead bespoke increasing contrasts in temperature, and
the relative nearness of the sunless sea-cliffs of the great abyss.
Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on the polished
floor ahead?obstructions which were quite definitely not penguins?and
turned on our second torch after making sure that the objects were quite
stationary.

XI.


Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to
proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some
experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing,
and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all
the original horror. We saw, as I have said, certain obstructions on the
polished floor ahead; and I may add that our nostrils were assailed
almost simultaneously by a very curious intensification of the strange
prevailing foetor, now quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench of
those others which had gone before us. The light of the second torch
left no doubt of what the obstructions were, and we dared approach them
only because we could see, even from a distance, that they were quite as
past all harming power as had been the six similar specimens unearthed
from the monstrous star-mounded graves at poor Lake?s camp.
      They were, indeed, as lacking in completeness as most of those we
had unearthed?though it grew plain from the thick, dark-green pool
gathering around them that their incompleteness was of infinitely
greater recency. There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake?s
bulletins would have suggested no less than eight as forming the group
which had preceded us. To find them in this state was wholly unexpected,
and we wondered what sort of monstrous struggle had occurred down here
in the dark.
      Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks;
and our ears now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had
those others disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? The
obstructions did not suggest it, for penguin beaks against the tough
tissues Lake had dissected could hardly account for the terrible damage
our approaching glance was beginning to make out. Besides, the huge
blind birds we had seen appeared to be singularly peaceful.
      Had there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the
absent four responsible? If so, where were they? Were they close at hand
and likely to form an immediate menace to us? We glanced anxiously at
some of the smooth-floored lateral passages as we continued our slow and
frankly reluctant approach. Whatever the conflict was, it had clearly
been that which had frightened the penguins into their unaccustomed
wandering. It must, then, have arisen near that faintly heard rookery in
the incalculable gulf beyond, since there were no signs that any birds
had normally dwelt here. Perhaps, we reflected, there had been a hideous
running fight, with the weaker party seeking to get back to the cached
sledges when their pursuers finished them. One could picture the
daemoniac fray between namelessly monstrous entities as it surged out of
the black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins squawking and
scurrying ahead.
      I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete
obstructions slowly and reluctantly. Would to heaven we had never
approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that
blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate
murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded?run back, before
we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with
something which will never let us breathe easily again!
      Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that
we soon realised the dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled,
compressed, twisted, and ruptured as they were, their chief common
injury was total decapitation. From each one the tentacled starfish-head
had been removed; and as we drew near we saw that the manner of removal
looked more like some hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary
form of cleavage. Their noisome dark-green ichor formed a large,
spreading pool; but its stench was half overshadowed by that newer and
stranger stench, here more pungent than at any other point along our
route. Only when we had come very close to the sprawling obstructions
could we trace that second, unexplainable foetor to any immediate
source?and the instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very
vivid sculptures of the Old Ones? history in the Permian age 150 million
years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which echoed hysterically
through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil palimpsest carvings.
      I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen
those primal sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the
nameless artist had suggested that hideous slime-coating found on
certain incomplete and prostrate Old Ones?those whom the frightful
shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly
headlessness in the great war of re-subjugation. They were infamous,
nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old, bygone things; for
shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or
portrayed by any beings. The mad author of the /Necronomicon/ had
nervously tried to swear that none had been bred on this planet, and
that only drugged dreamers had ever conceived them. Formless protoplasm
able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes?viscous
agglutinations of bubbling cells?rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids
infinitely plastic and ductile?slaves of suggestion, builders of
cities?more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more
amphibious, more and more imitative?Great God! What madness made even
those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things?
      And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and
reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those
headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new unknown odour whose
cause only a diseased fancy could envisage?clung to those bodies and
sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly
re-sculptured wall /in a series of grouped dots/?we understood the
quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those
four missing others?for all too well did we suspect they would do no
harm again. Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their
kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being.
Nature had played a hellish jest on them?as it will on any others that
human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that
hideously dead or sleeping polar waste?and this was their tragic homecoming.
      They had not been even savages?for what indeed had they done? That
awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch?perhaps an attack by the
furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them
and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and
paraphernalia . . . poor Lake, poor Gedney . . . and poor Old Ones!
Scientists to the last?what had they done that we would not have done in
their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of
the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced
things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables,
monstrosities, star-spawn?whatever they had been, they were men!
      They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had
once worshipped and roamed among the tree-ferns. They had found their
dead city brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days
as we had done. They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled
depths of blackness they had never seen?and what had they found? All
this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we
looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome
palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot-groups of fresh slime on
the wall beside them?looked and understood what must have triumphed and
survived down there in the Cyclopean water-city of that nighted,
penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun
to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth?s hysterical scream.
      The shock of recognising that monstrous slime and headlessness had
frozen us into mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later
conversations that we have learned of the complete identity of our
thoughts at that moment. It seemed aeons that we stood there, but
actually it could not have been more than ten or fifteen seconds. That
hateful, pallid mist curled forward as if veritably driven by some
remoter advancing bulk?and then came a sound which upset much of what we
had just decided, and in so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run
like mad past squawking, confused penguins over our former trail back to
the city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open
circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied automatic plunge
for the sane outer air and light of day.
      The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had
decided; because it was what poor Lake?s dissection had led us to
attribute to those we had just judged dead. It was, Danforth later told
me, precisely what he had caught in infinitely muffled form when at that
spot beyond the alley-corner above the glacial level; and it certainly
had a shocking resemblance to the wind-pipings we had both heard around
the lofty mountain caves. At the risk of seeming puerile I will add
another thing, too; if only because of the surprising way Danforth?s
impression chimed with mine. Of course common reading is what prepared
us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer
notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have
had access when writing his /Arthur Gordon Pym/ a century ago. It will
be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but
terrible and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic and
screamed eternally by the gigantic, spectrally snowy birds of that
malign region?s core. /?Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!?/ That, I may admit, is
exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind
the advancing white mist?that insidious musical piping over a singularly
wide range.
      We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been
uttered, though we knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable
any scream-roused and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us
in a moment if it really wished to do so. We had a vague hope, however,
that non-aggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason might cause
such a being to spare us in case of capture; if only from scientific
curiosity. After all, if such an one had nothing to fear for itself it
would have no motive in harming us. Concealment being futile at this
juncture, we used our torch for a running glance behind, and perceived
that the mist was thinning. Would we see, at last, a complete and living
specimen of those others? Again came that insidious musical
piping??/Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!?/
      Then, noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer, it
occurred to us that the entity might be wounded. We could take no
chances, however, since it was very obviously approaching in answer to
Danforth?s scream rather than in flight from any other entity. The
timing was too close to admit of doubt. Of the whereabouts of that less
conceivable and less mentionable nightmare?that foetid, unglimpsed
mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss
and sent land pioneers to re-carve and squirm through the burrows of the
hills?we could form no guess; and it cost us a genuine pang to leave
this probably crippled Old One?perhaps a lone survivor?to the peril of
recapture and a nameless fate.
      Thank heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had
thickened again, and was driving ahead with increased speed; whilst the
straying penguins in our rear were squawking and screaming and
displaying signs of a panic really surprising in view of their
relatively minor confusion when we had passed them. Once more came that
sinister, wide-ranged piping??/Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!?/ We had been
wrong. The thing was not wounded, but had merely paused on encountering
the bodies of its fallen kindred and the hellish slime inscription above
them. We could never know what that daemon message was?but those burials
at Lake?s camp had shewn how much importance the beings attached to
their dead. Our recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us the large
open cavern where various ways converged, and we were glad to be leaving
those morbid palimpsest sculptures?almost felt even when scarcely
seen?behind.
      Another thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the
possibility of losing our pursuer at this bewildering focus of large
galleries. There were several of the blind albino penguins in the open
space, and it seemed clear that their fear of the oncoming entity was
extreme to the point of unaccountability. If at that point we dimmed our
torch to the very lowest limit of travelling need, keeping it strictly
in front of us, the frightened squawking motions of the huge birds in
the mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our true course, and somehow
set up a false lead. Amidst the churning, spiralling fog the littered
and unglistening floor of the main tunnel beyond this point, as
differing from the other morbidly polished burrows, could hardly form a
highly distinguishing feature; even, so far as we could conjecture, for
those indicated special senses which made the Old Ones partly though
imperfectly independent of light in emergencies. In fact, we were
somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste. For we
had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; since
the consequences of loss in those unknown foothill honeycombings would
be unthinkable.
      The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the
thing did take a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right
one. The penguins alone could not have saved us, but in conjunction with
the mist they seem to have done so. Only a benign fate kept the curling
vapours thick enough at the right moment, for they were constantly
shifting and threatening to vanish. Indeed, they did lift for a second
just before we emerged from the nauseously re-sculptured tunnel into the
cave; so that we actually caught one first and only half-glimpse of the
oncoming entity as we cast a final, desperately fearful glance backward
before dimming the torch and mixing with the penguins in the hope of
dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us was benign, that which
gave us the half-glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for to that flash
of semi-vision can be traced a full half of the horror which has ever
since haunted us.
      Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than
the immemorial instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of
its pursuer; or perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a
subconscious question raised by one of our senses. In the midst of our
flight, with all our faculties centred on the problem of escape, we were
in no condition to observe and analyse details; yet even so our latent
brain-cells must have wondered at the message brought them by our
nostrils. Afterward we realised what it was?that our retreat from the
foetid slime-coating on those headless obstructions, and the coincident
approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of
stenches which logic called for. In the neighbourhood of the prostrate
things that new and lately unexplainable foetor had been wholly
dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely given place to the
nameless stench associated with those others. This it had not done?for
instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually undiluted,
and growing more and more poisonously insistent each second.
      So we glanced back?simultaneously, it would appear; though no
doubt the incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other.
As we did so we flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily
thinned mist; either from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could,
or in a less primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the
entity before we dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins of the
labyrinth-centre ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot?s wife,
paid much more dearly for a backward glance. And again came that
shocking, wide-ranged piping??/Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!?/
      I might as well be frank?even if I cannot bear to be quite
direct?in stating what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was
not to be admitted even to each other. The words reaching the reader can
never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our
consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to
dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the
dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through?perhaps better
than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a
high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left. Danforth was
totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the
journey was hearing him light-headedly chant an hysterical formula in
which I alone of mankind could have found anything but insane
irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the
penguins; reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and?thank
God?through the now empty vaultings behind. He could not have begun it
at once?else we would not have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder
to think of what a shade of difference in his nervous reactions might
have brought.
      ?South Station Under?Washington Under?Park Street
Under?Kendall?Central?Harvard. . . .? The poor fellow was chanting the
familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through
our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to
me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home-feeling. It had only
horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that
had suggested it. We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible
and incredibly moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that
entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see?for the mists were
indeed all too malignly thinned?was something altogether different, and
immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective
embodiment of the fantastic novelist?s ?thing that should not be?; and
its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as
one sees it from a station platform?the great black front looming
colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with
strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston
fills a cylinder.
      But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead
as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed
tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed
and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid
abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any
subway train?a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly
self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming
as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that
bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the
glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all
litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry?/?Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!?/
And at last we remembered that the daemoniac shoggoths?given life,
thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having
no language save that which the dot-groups expressed?/had likewise no
voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters/.

XII.


Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured
hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms
and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream-fragments
involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was
as if we floated in a nebulous world or dimension without time,
causation, or orientation. The grey half-daylight of the vast circular
space sobered us somewhat; but we did not go near those cached sledges
or look again at poor Gedney and the dog. They have a strange and
titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end of this planet will find them
still undisturbed.
      It was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we
first felt the terrible fatigue and short breath which our race through
the thin plateau air had produced; but not even the fear of collapse
could make us pause before reaching the normal outer realm of sun and
sky. There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from
those buried epochs; for as we wound our panting way up the sixty-foot
cylinder of primal masonry we glimpsed beside us a continuous procession
of heroic sculptures in the dead race?s early and undecayed technique?a
farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million years ago.
      Finally scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great
mound of tumbled blocks; with the curved walls of higher stonework
rising westward, and the brooding peaks of the great mountains shewing
beyond the more crumbled structures toward the east. The low antarctic
sun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon through rifts in
the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and deadness of the nightmare
city seemed all the starker by contrast with such relatively known and
accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape. The sky above
was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapours, and the cold
clutched at our vitals. Wearily resting the outfit-bags to which we had
instinctively clung throughout our desperate flight, we rebuttoned our
heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walk
through the aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our aroplane
waited. Of what had set us fleeing from the darkness of earth?s secret
and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all.
      In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to
the foothills?the probable ancient terrace?by which we had descended,
and could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins
on the rising slope ahead. Half way uphill toward our goal we paused for
a momentary breathing-spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic
palaeogean tangle of incredible stone shapes below us?once more outlined
mystically against an unknown west. As we did so we saw that the sky
beyond had lost its morning haziness; the restless ice-vapours having
moved up to the zenith, where their mocking outlines seemed on the point
of settling into some bizarre pattern which they feared to make quite
definite or conclusive.
      There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the
grotesque city a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose
needle-pointed heights loomed dream-like against the beckoning
rose-colour of the western sky. Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the
ancient table-land, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing
it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in
admiration of the scene?s unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror
began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line could be nothing
else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land?highest of
earth?s peaks and focus of earth?s evil; harbourers of nameless horrors
and Archaean secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve
their meaning; untrodden by any living thing of earth, but visited by
the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the plains in
the polar night?beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded
Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof unholy primal
legends hint evasively. We were the first human beings ever to see
them?and I hope to God we may be the last.
      If the sculptured maps and pictures in that pre-human city had
told truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than
300 miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence
jut above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of a
monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. Their
height, then, must have been tremendous beyond all known
comparison?carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled by
such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of
after unexplainable falls. Looking at them, I thought nervously of
certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down
into the city from their accursed slopes?and wondered how much sense and
how much folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them
so reticently. I recalled how their northerly end must come near the
coast at Queen Mary Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson?s
expedition was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away; and
hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of
what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed
a measure of my overwrought condition at the time?and Danforth seemed to
be even worse.
      Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and
reached our plane our fears had become transferred to the lesser but
vast enough range whose re-crossing lay ahead of us. From these
foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously
against the east, again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of
Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the damnable honeycombs inside
them, and of the frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed
their foetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we
could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those
suggestive skyward cave-mouths where the wind made sounds like an evil
musical piping over a wide range. To make matters worse, we saw distinct
traces of local mist around several of the summits?as poor Lake must
have done when he made that early mistake about volcanism?and thought
shiveringly of that kindred mist from which we had just escaped; of
that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering abyss whence all such
vapours came.
      All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy
flying furs. Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we
made a very smooth takeoff over the nightmare city. Below us the primal
Cyclopean masonry spread out as it had done when first we saw it?so
short, yet infinitely long, a time ago?and we began rising and turning
to test the wind for our crossing through the pass. At a very high level
there must have been great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds of the
zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things; but at 24,000 feet, the
height we needed for the pass, we found navigation quite practicable. As
we drew close to the jutting peaks the wind?s strange piping again
became manifest, and I could see Danforth?s hands trembling at the
controls. Rank amateur though I was, I thought at that moment that I
might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing
between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over
his duties he did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill and
self-possession about me, and stared at the sector of reddish farther
sky betwixt the walls of the pass?resolutely refusing to pay attention
to the puffs of mountain-top vapour, and wishing that I had wax-stopped
ears like Ulysses? men off the Sirens? coast to keep that disturbing
wind-piping from my consciousness.
      But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a
dangerous nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and
wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead
at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of
snowy, rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely
clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through
the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by
shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly
with the controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution
triumphed and we made the crossing safely?yet I am afraid that Danforth
will never be the same again.
      I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror
made him scream out so insanely?a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is
mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted
conversation above the wind?s piping and the engine?s buzzing as we
reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the
camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made
as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had
agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly?and I would not
speak of them now but for the need of heading off that
Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely
necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth?s
dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping
abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving
nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider
conquests.
      All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a
mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and
caves of echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains of madness
which we crossed; but a single fantastic, daemoniac glimpse, among the
churning zenith-clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward
mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable
that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had
passed through, and of the actual though unrecognised mirage of the dead
transmontane city experienced near Lake?s camp the day before; but it
was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.
      He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible
things about ?the black pit?, ?the carven rim?, ?the proto-shoggoths?,
?the windowless solids with five dimensions?, ?the nameless cylinder?,
?the elder pharos?, ?Yog-Sothoth?, ?the primal white jelly?, ?the colour
out of space?, ?the wings?, ?the eyes in darkness?, ?the moon-ladder?,
?the original, the eternal, the undying?, and other bizarre conceptions;
but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to
his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is
known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that
worm-riddled copy of the /Necronomicon/ kept under lock and key in the
college library.
      The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and
disturbed enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well
imagine that its swirls of ice-dust may have taken strange forms.
Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be
reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud,
might easily have supplied the rest?and of course Danforth did not hint
any of those specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to
draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one
instantaneous glance.
      At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a
single mad word of all too obvious source:
      /?Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!?/
 
 
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