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Title: At the mountains of madness

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Illustrator: Howard V. Brown

Release date: April 27, 2023 [eBook #70652]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Street & Smith Publications, Inc.,
1936

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70652

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AT THE
MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS ***

At the MOUNTAINS of MADNESS

By H. P. LOVECRAFT

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Stories February, March, April 1936.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my
advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my
reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its
vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps.
And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain.
Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I
suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be
nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aërial,
will count in my favor, for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they
will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be
carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures;
notwithstanding a strangeness and technique which art experts ought to
remark and puzzle over.
In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific
leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to
weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of
certain primordial and highly baffling myth cycles; and on the other hand,
sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and
over-ambitious program in the region of those mountains of madness.
It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my
associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of
making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly
controversial natures are concerned.
It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the
fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a geologist, my object in
leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing
deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic
continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Professor Frank H.
Pabodie of our engineering department.
I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this, but I did hope that
the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along previously
explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by
the ordinary methods of collection.

Pabodie's drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports,
was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine
the ordinary Artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular
rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness.
Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick,
dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional
piping for bores five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep all
formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog
sledges could carry. This was made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of
which most of the metal objects were fashioned.
Four large Dornier aëroplanes, designed especially for the tremendous
altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-
warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport
our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to
various suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of
dogs would serve us.
We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season—or longer, if
absolutely necessary—would permit, operating mostly in the mountain
ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying
degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent changes of
camp, made by aëroplane and involving distances great enough to be of
geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented
amount of material—especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so
narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured.
We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper
fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life history of this bleak realm of ice and
death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth's past. That
the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming
vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and
penguins of the northern edge are the only survivors, is a matter of common
information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy,
and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would
enlarge the aperture by blasting, in order to get specimens of suitable size
and condition.

Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper
soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed, or nearly exposed, land surfaces
—these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile
thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels.
We could not afford to waste drilling depth on any considerable amount of
more glaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper
electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice
with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo.
It is this plan—which we could not put into effect except experimentally on
an expedition such as ours—that the coming Starkweather-Moore
Expedition proposes to follow, despite the warnings I have issued since our
return from the antarctic.

The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent
wireless reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through
the later articles by Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four men from the
University—Pabodie, Lake of the biology department, Atwood of the
physics department—also a meteorologist—and myself, representing
geology and having nominal command, also sixteen assistants: seven
graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics.
Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aëroplane pilots, all but two of whom
were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigation
with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood and I. In addition, of
course, our two ships—wooden exwhalers, reinforced for ice conditions and
having auxiliary steam—were fully manned.
The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special
contributions, financed the expedition; hence our preparations were
extremely thorough, despite the absence of great publicity.
The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our
five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were loaded.
We were marvelously well-equipped for our specific purposes, and in all
matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp

construction we profited by the excellent example of our many recent and
exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of
these predecessors which made our own expedition—ample though it was—
so little noticed by the world at large.
As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd,
1930, taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama
Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place
we took on final supplies.
None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence
we all relied greatly on our ship captains—J. B. Douglas, commanding the
brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg
Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic—both veteran whalers in
antarctic waters.
As we left the inhabited world behind the sun sank lower and lower in the
north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62°
South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs—tablelike objects with vertical
sides—and just before reaching the antarctic circle, which we crossed on
October 20th with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably
troubled with field ice.
The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage
through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigors to come. On
many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these
included a strikingly vivid mirage—the first I had ever seen—in which
distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.
Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly
packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175°.
On the morning of October 26th a strong land blink appeared on the south,
and before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty,
and snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the whole
vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown
continent and its cryptic world of frozen death.
These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, and it
would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of
Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound, at
the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9´.

The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks
of mystery loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of
noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its
hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black
bits of exposed granite slope.
Through the desolate summits swept raging, intermittent gusts of the terrible
antarctic wind, whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild
and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range,
and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me
disquieting and even dimly terrible.
Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian
paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing
descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on,
that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.
On the 7th of November, sight of the westward range having been
temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the
cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of
the Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low,
white line of the great ice barrier, rising perpendicularly to a height of two
hundred feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of
southward navigation.
In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the
lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriaceous peak towered up some twelve
thousand seven hundred feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of
the sacred Fujiyama, while beyond it rose the white, ghostlike height of Mt.
Terror, ten thousand nine hundred feet in altitude, and now extinct as a
volcano.
Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate
assistants—a brilliant young fellow named Danforth—pointed out what
looked like lava on the snowy slope, remarking that this mountain,
discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source of Poe's image when
he wrote seven years later:

"—the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole."

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal
of Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe's only
long story—the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the
barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriad of
grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins, while many fat seals
were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of
slowly drifting ice.
Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly
after midnight, on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each
of the ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy
arrangement.
Our sensations on first treading antarctic soil were poignant and complex,
even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had
preceded us.
Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano's slope was only a
provisional one, headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham. We landed all
our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks,
experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and aërial, aëroplane
parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless outfits—
besides those in the planes—capable of communicating with the Arkham's
large outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be likely
to visit.
The ship's outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey
press reports to the Arkham Advertiser's powerful wireless station on
Kingsport Head, Mass. We hoped to complete our work during a single
antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible we would winter on the
Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice for
another summer's supplies.

I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our
early work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at
several points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie's
apparatus accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our
provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of
the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five
huge aëroplanes at the camp atop the barrier.
The health of our land party—twenty men and fifty-five Alaskan sledge dogs
—was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no really
destructive temperatures or windstorms.
For the most part, the thermometer varied between zero and 20° or 25°
above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to
rigors of this sort. The barrier camp was semipermanent, and destined to be a
storage cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite, and other supplies.
Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material,
the fifth being left with a pilot and two men, from the ships, at the storage
cache to form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our
exploring planes were lost.
Later, when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we would
employ one or two in a shuttle transportation service between this cache and
another permanent base on the great plateau from six hundred to seven
hundred miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier.
Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests that
pour down from the plateau, we determined to dispense with intermediate
bases, taking our chances in the interest of economy and probable efficiency.
Wireless reports have spoken of the breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop flight
of our squadron on November 21st over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks
rising on the west, and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our
engines.
Wind troubled us only moderately, and our radio compasses helped us
through the one opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise loomed
ahead, between Latitudes 83° and 84°, we knew we had reached Beardmore
Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was
now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coast line.

At last we were truly entering the white, æon-dead world of the ultimate
south. Even as we realized it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern
distance, towering up to its height of almost fifteen thousand feet.
The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in
Latitude 86° 7´, East Longitude 174° 23´, and the phenomenally rapid and
effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge
trips and short aëroplane flights, are matters of history; as is the arduous and
triumphant ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate
students—Gedney and Carroll—on December 13th to 15th.
We were some eight thousand five hundred feet above sea-level. When
experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through
the snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the small
melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places,
where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing mineral specimens.
The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed
our belief that this plateau was homogeneous, with the great bulk of the
continent to the west, but somewhat different from the parts lying eastward
below South America—which we then thought to form a separate and
smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross
and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the report.
In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed
their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings and
fragments; notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such mollusks as
linguellæ and gastropods—all of which seemed of real significance in
connection with the region's primordial history. There was also a queer
triangular, striated marking, about a foot in greatest diameter, which Lake
pieced together from three fragments of slate brought up from a deep-blasted
aperture.
These fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen
Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious
marking unusually puzzling and provocative, though to my geological eye it
looked not unlike some of the ripple effects reasonably common in the
sedimentary rocks.
Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into which a
sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself produces odd

distorting effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no reason for
extreme wonder over the striated depression.

On January 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Daniels, all six of the students, four
mechanics, and myself flew directly over the south pole in two of the great
planes, being forced down once by a sudden high wind, which, fortunately,
did not develop into a typical storm. This was, as the papers have stated, one
of several observation flights, during others of which we tried to discern new
topographical features in areas unreached by previous explorers.
Our early flights were disappointing in this latter respect, though they
afforded us some magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and deceptive
mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had given us some
brief foretastes.
Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole
white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian
dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight
sun.
On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying, owing to the tendency
of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no
visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.
At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying five hundred
miles eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-
base at a point which would probably be on the smaller continental division,
as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there would
be desirable for purposes of comparison.
Our health so far had remained excellent—lime juice well offsetting the
steady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperatures generally above zero
enabling us to do without our thickest furs.
It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we might be able to
conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long
antarctic night. Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west,
but we had escaped damage through the skill of Atwood in devising

rudimentary aëroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and in
reinforcing the principal camp buildings with snow. Our good luck and
efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.
The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told also of
Lake's strange and dogged insistence on a westward—or rather,
northwestward—prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new base.
It seems that he had pondered a great deal and with alarmingly radical daring
over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into it certain
contradictions in nature and geological period which whetted his curiosity to
the utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the
west-stretching formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently
belonged.
He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky,
unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced
evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of so vastly
ancient a date—Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian—as to preclude the
probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all
above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These fragments, with
their odd marking, must have been five hundred million to a thousand
million years old.

II.
Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of
Lake's start northwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or
penetrated by human imagination, though we did not mention his wild hopes
of revolutionizing the entire sciences of biology and geology.
His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 11th to 18th with
Pabodie and five others—marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset when
crossing one of the great pressure ridges in the ice—had brought up more
and more of the Archæan slate; and even I was interested by the singular
profusion of evident fossil markings in that unbelievably ancient stratum.

These markings, however, were of very primitive life forms involving no
great paradox except that any life forms should occur in rock as definitely
pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed to see the good sense
of Lake's demand for an interlude in our time-saving program—an interlude
requiring the use of all four planes, many men, and the whole of the
expedition's mechanical apparatus.
I did not, in the end, veto the plan, though I decided not to accompany the
northwestward party despite Lake's plea for my geological advice. While
they were gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and
work out final plans for the eastward shift. In preparation for this transfer,
one of the planes had begun to move up a good gasoline supply from
McMurdo Sound; but this could wait temporarily. I kept with me one sledge
and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be at any time without possible
transportation in an utterly tenantless world of æon-long death.
Lake's subexpedition into the unknown, as every one will recall, sent out its
own reports from the short-wave transmitters on the planes; these being
simultaneously picked up by our apparatus at the southern base and by the
Arkham at McMurdo Sound, whence they were relayed to the outside world
on wave lengths up to fifty meters.
The start was made January 22nd at 4 a.m.; and the first wireless message
we received came only two hours later, when Lake spoke of descending and
starting a small-scale ice-melting and bore at a point some three hundred
miles away from us. Six hours after that a second and very excited message
told of the frantic, beaverlike work whereby a shallow shaft had been sunk
and blasted, culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with several
markings approximately like the one which had caused the original
puzzlement.
Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight in
the teeth of a raw and piercing gale; and when I dispatched a message of
protest against further hazards, Lake replied curtly that his new specimens
made any hazard worth taking.
I saw that his excitement had reached the point of mutiny, and that I could do
nothing to check this headlong risk of the whole expedition's success; but it
was appalling to think of his plunging deeper and deeper into that
treacherous and sinister white immensity of tempests and unfathomed

mysteries which stretched off for some fifteen hundred miles to the half-
known, half-suspected coast line of Queen Mary and Knox Lands.

Then, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited message
from Lake's moving plane, which almost reversed my sentiments and made
me wish I had accompanied the party:
"10:05 p.m. On the wing. After snowstorm, have spied mountain
range ahead higher than any hitherto seen. May equal Himalayas,
allowing for height of plateau. Probable Latitude 76° 15´,
Longitude 113° 10´ E. Reaches far as can see to right and left.
Suspicion of two smoking cones. All peaks black and bare of
snow. Gale blowing off them impedes navigation."
After that Pabodie, the men, and I hung breathlessly over the receiver.
Thought of this titanic mountain rampart seven hundred miles away
inflamed our deepest sense of adventure; and we rejoiced that our
expedition, if not ourselves personally, had been its discoverers. In half an
hour Lake called us again:
"Moulton's plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but nobody
hurt and perhaps can repair. Shall transfer essentials to other
three for return or further moves if necessary, but no more heavy
plane travel needed just now. Mountains surpass anything in
imagination. Am going up scouting in Carroll's plane, with all
weight out.
"You can't imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must go
over thirty-five thousand feet. Everest out of the running,
Atwood to work out height with theodolite while Carroll and I go
up. Probably wrong about cones, for formations look stratified.
Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in. Queer
sky line effects—regular sections of cubes clinging to highest
peaks. Whole thing marvelous in red-gold light of low sun. Like
land of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of
untrodden wonder. Wish you were here to study."

Though it was technically sleeping time, not one of us listeners thought for a
moment of retiring. It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo
Sound, where the supply cache and the Arkham were also getting the
messages; for Captain Douglas gave out a call congratulating everybody on
the important find, and Sherman, the cache operator, seconded his
sentiments. We were sorry, of course, about the damaged aëroplane, but
hoped it could be easily mended. Then, at eleven p.m., came another call
from Lake:
"Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don't dare try really tall
peaks in present weather, but shall later. Frightful work climbing,
and hard going at this altitude, but worth it. Great range fairly
solid, hence can't get any glimpses beyond. Main summits
exceed Himalayas, and very queer. Range looks like pre-
Cambrian slate, with plain signs of many other upheaved strata.
Was wrong about volcanism. Goes farther in either direction than
we can see. Swept clear of snow above about twenty-one
thousand feet.
"Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low
square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of
low, vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep
mountains in Roerich's paintings. Impressive from distance. Flew
close to some, and Carroll thought they were formed of smaller
separate pieces, but that is probably weathering. Most edges
crumbled and rounded off as if exposed to storms and climate
changes for millions of years.
"Parts, especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-colored rock
than any visible strata on slopes proper, hence an evidently
crystalline origin. Close flying shows many cave mouths, some
unusually regular in outline, square or semicircular. You must
come and investigate. Think I saw rampart squarely on top of one
peak. Height seems about thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand
feet. Am up twenty-one thousand five hundred myself, in
devilish, gnawing cold. Wind whistles and pipes through passes
and in and out of caves, but no flying danger so far."
From then on for another half hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment,
and expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied

that I would join him as soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie and
I would work out the best gasoline plan—just where and how to concentrate
our supply in view of the expedition's altered character.
Obviously, Lake's boring operations, as well as his aëroplane activities,
would need a great deal delivered at the new base which he was to establish
at the foot of the mountains; and it was possible that the eastward flight
might not be made, after all, this season. In connection with this business I
called Captain Douglas and asked him to get as much as possible out of the
ships and up the barrier with the single dog team we had left there. A direct
route across the unknown region between Lake and McMurdo Sound was
what we really ought to establish.
Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where
Moulton's plane had been forced down, and where repairs had already
progressed somewhat. The ice sheet was very thin, with dark ground here
and there visible, and he would sink some borings and blasts at that very
point before making any sledge trips or climbing expeditions.
He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and the queer state of
his sensations at being in the lee of vast, silent pinnacles, whose ranks shot
up like a wall reaching the sky at the world's rim.

It was a queer state of sensations—being in the lee of vast, silent
pinnacles, where ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at the world's
rim.

Atwood's theodolite observations had placed the height of the five tallest
peaks at from thirty thousand to thirty-four thousand feet.
The windswept nature of the terrain clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the
occasional existence of prodigious gales, violent beyond anything we had so
far encountered. His camp lay a little more than five miles from where the
higher foothills rose abruptly.
I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words—flashed
across a glacial void of seven hundred miles—as he urged that we all hasten

with the matter and get the strange, new region disposed of as soon as
possible. He was about to rest now, after a continuous day's work of almost
unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and results.

In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Captain
Douglas at their widely separated bases. It was agreed that one of Lake's
planes would come to my base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as
well as for all the fuel it could carry. The rest of the fuel question, depending
on our decision about an easterly trip, could wait for a few days, since Lake
had enough for immediate camp heat and borings.
Eventually the old southern base ought to be restocked, but if we postponed
the easterly trip we would not use it till the next summer, and, meanwhile,
Lake must send a plane to explore a direct route between his new mountains
and McMurdo Sound.
Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as the
case might be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straight
from Lake's base to the Arkham without returning to this spot. Some of our
conical tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now
we decided to complete the job of making a permanent village. Owing to a
very liberal tent supply, Lake had with him all that his base would need,
even after our arrival. I wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be ready for the
northwestward move after one day's work and one night's rest.
Our labors, however, were not very steady after four p.m., for about that
time Lake began sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages.
His working day had started unpropitiously, since an aëroplane survey of the
nearly exposed rock surfaces showed an entire absence of those Archæan
and primordial strata for which he was looking, and which formed so great a
part of the colossal peaks that loomed up at a tantalizing distance from the
camp.
Most of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and Comanchean
sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists, with now and then a glossy
black outcropping suggesting a hard and slaty coal.

This rather discouraged Lake, whose plans all hinged on unearthing
specimens more than five hundred million years older. It was clear to him
that in order to recover the Archæan slate vein in which he had found the
odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from these foothills
to the steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves.
He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of the
expedition's general program; hence, he set up the drill and put five men to
work with it while the rest finished settling the camp and repairing the
damaged aëroplane. The softest visible rock—a sandstone about a quarter of
a mile from the camp—had been chosen for the first sampling; and the drill
made excellent progress without much supplementary blasting.
It was about three hours afterward, following the first really heavy blast of
the operation, that the shouting of the drill crew was heard; and that young
Gedney—the acting foreman—rushed into the camp with the startling news.

They had struck a cave. Early in the boring the sandstone had given place to
a vein of Comanchean limestone, full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals,
echini, and spirifera, and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges
and marine vertebrate bones—the latter probably of teliosts, sharks, and
ganoids.
This, in itself, was important enough, as affording the first vertebrate fossils
the expedition had yet secured; but when shortly afterward the drill head
dropped through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and
doubly intense wave of excitement spread among the excavators.
A good-sized blast had laid open the subterrane secret; and now, through a
jagged aperture perhaps five feet across and three feet thick, there yawned
before the avid searchers a section of shallow limestone hollowing worn
more than fifty million years ago by the trickling ground waters of a bygone
tropic world.
The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep, but extended
off indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which
suggested its membership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and

floor were abundantly equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites, some
of which met in columnar form.
But important above all else was the vast deposit of shells and bones, which
in places nearly choked the passage. Washed down from unknown jungles of
Mesozoic tree ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan palms, and
primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained representatives of
more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species than the greatest
palæontologist could have counted or classified in a year. Mollusks,
crustacean armor, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals—
great and small, known and unknown.
No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp shouting, and no wonder every one
else dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting cold to where the
tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and
vanished æons.
When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity he scribbled a
message in his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to
dispatch it by wireless.
This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of
early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonta
and thecoiidea, great mosasaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebræ and armor
plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing bones, Archaeopteryx débris, Miocene
sharks' teeth, primitive bird skulls, and other bones of archaic mammals such
as Palæotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons, and Titanotheriidæ.
There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer, or
bovine animal; hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred
during the Oligocene Age, and that the hollowed stratum had lain in its
present dried, dead, and inaccessible state for at least thirty million years.
On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life forms was singular in the
highest degree. Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of
such typical imbedded fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably
Comanchean and not a particle earlier; the free fragments in the hollow
space included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto considered
as peculiar to far older periods—even rudimentary fishes, mollusks, and
corals as remote as the Silurian or Ordovician.

The inevitable inference was that in this part of the world there had been a
remarkable and unique degree of continuity between the life of over three
hundred million years ago and that of only thirty million years ago. How far
this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene Age when the cavern was
closed was of course past all speculation.
In any event, the coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some five
hundred thousand years ago—a mere yesterday as compared with the age of
this cavity—must have put an end to any of the primal forms which had
locally managed to outlive their common terms.

Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletin
written and dispatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could
get back. After that Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes,
transmitting to me—and to the Arkham for relaying to the outside world—
the frequent postscripts which Lake sent him by a succession of messengers.
Those who followed the newspapers will remember the excitement created
among men of science by that afternoon's reports—reports which have
finally led, after all these years, to the organization of that very
Starkweather-Moore Expedition which I am so anxious to dissuade from its
purposes. I had better give the messages literally as Lake sent them, and as
our base operator McTighe translated them from his pencil shorthand:
Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and
limestone fragments from blasts. Several distinct triangular
striated prints like those in archæan slate, proving that source
survived from over six hundred million years ago to
Comanchean times without more than moderate morphological
changes and decrease in average size. Comanchean prints
apparently more primitive or decadent, if anything, than older
ones. Emphasize importance of discovery in press. Will mean to
biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics.
Joins up with my previous work and amplifies conclusions.
Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has seen whole
cycle or cycles of organic life before known one that begins with

Archæozoic cells. Was evolved and specialized not later than a
thousand million years ago, when planet was young and recently
uninhabitable for any life forms of normal protoplasmic
structure. Question arises when, where, and how development
took place.

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

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

10:15 p.m. Important discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins, working
underground at 9:45 with light, found monstrous barrel-shaped
fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable unless
overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata. Tissue
evidently preserved by mineral salts. Tough as leather, but
astonishing flexibility retained in places. Marks of broken-off
parts at ends and around sides. Six feet end to end, three and five
tenths feet central diameter, tapering to one foot at each end.
Like a barrel with five bulging ridges in place of staves. Lateral
breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at equator in middle of these
ridges. In furrows between ridges are curious growths—combs or
wings that fold up and spread out like fans. All greatly damaged
but one, which gives almost seven-foot wing spread.
Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth,
especially fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon.
These wings seem to be membranous, stretched on framework of
glandular tubing. Apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at
wing tips. Ends of body shriveled, giving no clue to interior or to
what has been broken off there. Must dissect when we get back
to camp. Can't decide whether vegetable or animal. Many
features obviously of almost incredible primitiveness. Have set
all hands cutting stalactites and looking for further specimens.
Additional scarred bones found, but these must wait. Having
trouble with dogs. They can't endure the new specimen, and
would probably tear it to pieces if we didn't keep it at a distance
from them.

11:30 p.m. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas. Matter of highest
—I might say transcendent—importance. Arkham must relay to
Kingsport Head Station at once. Strange barrel growth is the
archæan thing that left prints in rocks. Mills, Boudreau, and
Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more at underground point
forty feet from aperture. Mixed with curiously rounded and
configured soapstone fragments smaller than one previously

found—star-shaped, but no marks of breakage except at some of
the points.
Of organic specimens, eight apparently perfect, with all
appendages. Have brought all to surface, leading off dogs to
distance. They cannot stand the things. Give close attention to
description and repeat back for accuracy. Papers must get this
right.
Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot, five-ridged barrel
torso three and five tenths feet central diameter, one foot end
diameters. Dark gray, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot
membranous wings of same color, found folded, spread out of
furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, or
lighter gray, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have
serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the
five vertical, stavelike ridges, are five systems of light-gray
flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but
expansible to maximum length of over three feet. Like arms of
primitive crinoid. Single stalks three inches diameter branch after
six inches into five substalks, each of which branches after eight
inches into five small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each
stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles.
At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like
suggestions, holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped
apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various
prismatic colors.
Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-
inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in
exact center of top probably breathing aperture. At end of each
tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls
back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently an
eye.
Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of
starfish-shaped head and end in saclike swellings of same color
which, upon pressure, open to bell-shaped orifices two inches
maximum diameter and lined with sharp, white tooth-like

projections—probable mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points
of starfish head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points
clinging to bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite
vast toughness.
At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning
counterparts of head arrangements exist. Bulbous light-gray
pseudoneck, without gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed
starfish arrangement.
Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven
inches diameter at base to about two and five tenths at point. To
each point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined
membranous triangle eight inches long and six wide at farther
end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudofoot which had made prints
in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years
old.
From inner angles of starfish arrangement project two-foot
reddish tubes tapering from three inches diameter at base to one
at tip. Orifices at tips. All these parts infinitely tough and
leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot arms with paddles
undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort, marine or
otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated
muscularity. As found, all these projections tightly folded over
pseudoneck and end of torso, corresponding to projections at
other end.
Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but
odds now favor animal. Probably represents incredibly advanced
evolution of radiata without loss of certain primitive features.
Echinoderm resemblances unmistakable despite local
contradictory evidences.
Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat, but
may have use in water navigation. Symmetry is curiously
vegetablelike, suggesting vegetable's essential up-and-down
structure rather than animal's fore-and-aft structure. Fabulously
early date of evolution, preceding even simplest archæan
Protozoa hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to origin.

Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain
creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence
outside antarctic becomes inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have
read Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton Smith's nightmare
paintings based on text, and will understand when I speak of
Elder Things supposed to have created all earth life as jest or
mistake. Students have always thought conception formed from
morbid imaginative treatment of very ancient tropical radiata.
Also like prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of—
Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.
Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably of late Cretaceous
or early Eocene period, judging from associated specimens.
Massive stalagmites deposited above them. Hard work hewing
out, but toughness prevented damage. State of preservation
miraculous, evidently owing to limestone action. No more found
so far, but will resume search later. Job now to get fourteen huge
specimens to camp without dogs, which bark furiously and can't
be trusted near them.
With nine men—three left to guard the dogs—we ought to
manage the three sledges fairly well, though wind is bad. Must
establish plane communication with McMurdo Sound and begin
shipping material. But I've got to dissect one of these things
before we take any rest. Wish I had a real laboratory here. Dyer
better kick himself for having tried to stop my westward trip.
First the world's greatest mountains, and then this. If this last isn't
the high spot of the expedition, I don't know what is. We're made
scientifically. Congrats, Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the
cave. Now will Arkham please repeat description?

"I've got to dissect one of these things before——"
"First the world's greatest mountains—then this!"

The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almost
beyond description, nor were our companions much behind us in
enthusiasm. McTighe, who had hastily translated a few high spots as they
came from the droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his
shorthand version, as soon as Lake's operator signed off.
All appreciated the epoch-making significance of the discovery, and I sent
Lake congratulations as soon as the Arkham's operator had repeated back the
descriptive parts as requested; and my example was followed by Sherman
from his station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache, as well as by Captain
Douglas of the Arkham.
Later, as head of the expedition, I added some remarks to be relayed through
the Arkham to the outside world. Of course, rest was an absurd thought
amidst this excitement; and my only wish was to get to Lake's camp as
quickly as I could. It disappointed me when he sent word that a rising
mountain gale made early aërial travel impossible.
But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish disappointment.
Lake, sending more messages, told of the completely successful

transportation of the fourteen great specimens to the camp. It had been a
hard pull, for the things were surprisingly heavy; but nine men had
accomplished it very neatly. Now some of the party were hurriedly building
a snow corral at a safe distance from the camp, to which the dogs could be
brought for greater convenience in feeding. The specimens were laid out on
the hard snow near the camp, save for one on which Lake was making crude
attempts at dissection.
This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected, for,
despite the heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the
deceptively flexible tissues of the chosen specimen—a powerful and intact
one—lost nothing of their more than leathery toughness. Lake was puzzled
as to how he might make the requisite incisions without violence destructive
enough to upset all the structural niceties he was looking for.
He had, it is true, seven more perfect specimens; but these were too few to
use up recklessly unless the cave might later yield an unlimited supply.
Accordingly, he removed the specimen and dragged in one which, though
having remnants of the starfish arrangements at both ends, was badly
crushed and partly disrupted along one of the great torso furrows.
Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocative
indeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments
hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the little that was achieved left
us all awed and bewildered.
Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no
product of any cell growth science knows about. There had been scarcely
any mineral replacement, and despite an age of perhaps forty million years
the internal organs were wholly intact.
The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an
inherent attribute of the thing's form of organization, and pertained to some
paleocene cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of
speculation.
At first all that Lake found was dry, but as the heated tent produced its
thawing effect, organic moisture of pungent and offensive odor was
encountered toward the thing's uninjured side. It was not blood, but a thick,
dark-green fluid apparently answering the same purpose. By the time Lake
reached this stage all thirty-seven dogs had been brought to the still

uncompleted corral near the camp, and even at that distance set up a savage
barking and show of restlessness at the acrid, diffusive smell.

Far from helping to place the strange entity, this provisional dissection
merely deepened its mystery. All guesses about its external members had
been correct, and on the evidence of these one could hardly hesitate to call
the thing animal, but internal inspection brought up so many vegetable
evidences that Lake was left hopelessly at sea. It had digestion and
circulation, and eliminated waste matter through the reddish tubes of its
starfish-shaped base.
Cursorily, one would say that its respiratory apparatus handled oxygen rather
than carbon dioxide; and there were odd evidences of air-storage chambers
and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two
other fully developed breathing systems—gills and pores.
Clearly, it was amphibian and probably adapted to long airless hibernation
periods as well. Vocal organs seemed present in connection with the main
respiratory system, but they presented anomalies beyond immediate solution.
Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable utterance, seemed barely
conceivable, but musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly
probable. The muscular system was almost pre-naturally developed.
The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake
aghast. Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing
had a set of gangliar centers and connectives arguing the very extremes of
specialized development.
Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced, and there were signs of a
sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry cilia of the head,
involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism. Probably it had
more than five senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from any
existing analogy.
It must, Lake thought, have been a creature of keen sensitiveness and
delicately differentiated functions in its primal world—much like the ants
and bees of to-day. It reproduced like the vegetable cryptogams, especially

the pteridophyta; having spore cases at the tips of the wings and evidently
developing from a thallus or prothallus.
But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a radiate, but
was clearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but had three fourths of
the essentials of animal structure. That it was marine in origin, its
symmetrical contour and certain other attributes clearly indicated; yet one
could not be exact as to the limit of its later adaptations.
The wings, after all, held a persistent suggestion of the aërial. How it could
have undergone its tremendously complex evolution on a new-born earth in
time to leave prints in archæan rocks was so far beyond conception as to
make Lake whimsically recall the primal myths about Great Old Ones who
filtered down from the stars and concocted earth life as a joke or mistake;
and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from outside told by a folklorist
colleague in Miskatonic's English department.

Naturally, he considered the possibility of the pre-Cambrian prints having
been made by a less evolved ancestor of the present specimens, but quickly
rejected this too-facile theory upon considering the advanced structural
qualities of the older fossils. If anything, the later contours showed
decadence rather than higher evolution.
The size of the pseudofeet had decreased, and the whole morphology seemed
coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs, just examined,
held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more complex.
Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether, little
could be said to have been solved; and Lake fell back on mythology for a
provisional name—jocosely dubbing his finds "The Elder Ones."
At about two-thirty a.m., having decided to postpone further work and get a
little rest, he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged from
the laboratory tent, and studied the intact specimens with renewed interest.
The ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a trifle, so
that the head points and tubes of two or three showed signs of unfolding; but
Lake did not believe there was any danger of immediate decomposition in
the almost subzero air. He did, however, move all the undissected specimens

closer together and throw a spare tent over them in order to keep off the
direct solar rays. That would also help to keep their possible scent away
from the dogs, whose hostile unrest was really becoming a problem, even at
their substantial distance and behind the higher and higher snow walls,
which an increased quota of the men were hastening to raise around their
quarters.
He had to weight down the corners of the tent cloth with heavy blocks of
snow to hold it in place amidst the rising gale, for the titan mountains
seemed about to deliver some gravely severe blasts. Early apprehensions
about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and under Atwood's supervision
precautions were taken to bank the tents, new dog corral, and crude
aëroplane shelters with snow, on the mountainward side. These latter
shelters, begun with hard snow blocks during odd moments, were by no
means as high as they should have been; and Lake finally detached all hands
from other tasks to work on them.
It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us all to
share the rest period his outfit would take when the shelter walls were a little
higher. He held some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether, and repeated
his praise of the really marvelous drills that had helped him make his
discovery. Atwood also sent greetings and praises.
I gave Lake a warm word of congratulation, owning up that he was right
about the western trip, and we all agreed to get in touch by wireless at ten in
the morning. If the gale was then over, Lake would send a plane for the party
at my base. Just before retiring I dispatched a final message to the Arkham,
with instructions about toning down the day's news for the outside world,
since the full details seemed radical enough to rouse a wave of incredulity
until further substantiated.

III.
None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning. Both
the excitement of Lake's discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were
against such a thing. So savage was the blast even where we were, that we

could not help wondering how much worse it was at Lake's camp, directly
under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it.
McTighe was awake at ten o'clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless, as
agreed, but some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the westward
seemed to prevent communication. We did, however, get the Arkham, and
Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly trying to reach Lake. He
had not known about the wind, for very little was blowing at McMurdo
Sound, despite its persistent rage where we were.
Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at
intervals, but invariably without results. About noon a positive frenzy of
wind stampeded out of the west, causing us to fear for the safety of our
camp; but it eventually died down, with only a moderate relapse at two p.m.
After three o'clock it was very quiet, and we redoubled our efforts to get
Lake. Reflecting that he had four planes, each provided with an excellent
short-wave outfit, we could not imagine any ordinary accident capable of
crippling all his wireless equipment at once. Nevertheless, the stony silence
continued, and when we thought of the delirious force the wind must have
had in his locality we could not help making the most direful conjectures.
By six o'clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after a wireless
consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps toward
investigation. The fifth aëroplane, which we had left at the McMurdo Sound
supply cache with Sherman and two sailors, was in good shape and ready for
instant use, and it seemed that the very emergency for which it had been
saved was now upon us.
I got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to join me with the plane and the
two sailors at the southern base as quickly as possible, the air conditions
being apparently highly favorable. We then talked over the personnel of the
coming investigation party, and decided that we would include all hands,
together with the sledge and dogs which I had kept with me. Even so great a
load would not be too much for one of the huge planes built to our special
orders for heavy machinery transportation. At intervals I still tried to reach
Lake with the wireless, but all to no purpose.
Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at seven thirty;
and reported a quiet flight from several points on the wing. They arrived at
our base at midnight, and all hands at once discussed the next move. It was

risky business sailing over the antarctic in a single aëroplane without any
line of bases, but no one drew back from what seemed like the plainest
necessity. We turned in at two o'clock for a brief rest after some preliminary
loading of the plane, but were up again in four hours to finish the loading
and packing.
At seven fifteen a.m., January 25th, we started northwestward under
McTighe's pilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food
supply, and other items including the plane's wireless outfit. The atmosphere
was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature, and we anticipated
very little trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude designated by Lake
as the site of his camp. Our apprehensions were over what we might find, or
fail to find, at the end of our journey, for silence continued to answer all calls
dispatched to the camp.

Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my
recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at
the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind
possesses through its accustomed conception of external nature and nature's
laws.
Thenceforward the ten of us—but the student Danforth and myself above all
others—were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which
nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from
sharing with mankind in general if we could. The newspapers have printed
the bulletins we sent from the moving plane, telling of our nonstop course,
our two battles with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken
surface where Lake had sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before, and
our sight of a group of those strange fluffy snow cylinders noted by
Amundsen and Byrd as rolling in the wind across the endless leagues of
frozen plateau.
There came a point, though, when our sensations could not be conveyed in
any words the press would understand, and a later point when we had to
adopt an actual rule of strict censorship.

The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones and
pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent every one to the windows of the great
cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in gaining
prominence; hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off, and visible
only because of their abnormal height.
Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky, allowing us to
distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious
sense of phantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light
against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds.
In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous
secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires
marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream,
and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultradimensionality. I could
not help feeling that they were evil things—mountains of madness whose
farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of
a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave
appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and
æon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the
higher mountain sky line—regularities like clinging fragments of perfect
cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed
justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial temple
ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and strangely painted by
Roerich.
There was indeed something hauntingly Roerichlike about this whole
unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when
we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too,
another wave of uneasy consciousness of archæan mythical resemblances, of
how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau
of Leng in the primal writings.

Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia, but the racial memory of
man—or of his predecessors—is long, and it may well be that certain tales
have come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier
than Asia and earlier than any human world we know.
A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the
fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees of
Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself.
Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region I would
care to be in or near, nor did I relish the proximity of a world that had ever
bred such ambiguous and archæan monstrosities as those Lake had just
mentioned. At the moment I felt sorry that I had ever read the abhorred
Necronomicon, or talked so much with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist
Wilmarth at the university.

This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre
mirage which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we
drew near the mountains and began to make out the cumulative undulations
of the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding
weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present
sample, but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing
symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and
towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice vapors above our heads.
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or
to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry
embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were
truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical
shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of
thinnish scalloped disks, and strange, beetling, tablelike constructions
suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-
pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath.
There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting
cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional
needlelike spires in curious clusters of five.

All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges
crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale
of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer giganticism.
The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms
observed and drawn by the arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820, but at this time
and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring stupendously
ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds, and the pall of
probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our expedition, we all
seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and infinitely evil portent.
I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process the
various nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted, temporary forms of
even vaster hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to churning
opalescence, we began to look earthward again, and saw that our journey's
end was not far off.
The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzily up like a fearsome rampart of
giants, their curious regularities showing with startling clearness even
without a field glass. We were over the lowest foothills now, and could see
amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau a couple of
darkish spots which we took to be Lake's camp and boring.
The higher foothills shot up between five and six miles away, forming a
range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than Himalayan peaks
beyond them. At length Ropes—the student who had relieved McTighe at
the controls—began to head downward toward the left-hand dark spot whose
size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe sent out the last
uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our expedition.
Every one, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the rest
of our antarctic sojourn.
Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report of the tragedy we
found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole Lake party by
the frightful wind of the preceding day, or of the night before that. There
were eleven known dead, young Gedney was missing.
People pardoned our hazy lack of details through realization of the shock the
sad event must have caused us, and believed us when we explained that the

mangling action of the wind had rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable for
transportation outside.
Indeed, I flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress, utter
bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the truth
in any specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in what we dared
not tell; what I would not tell now but for the need of warning others off
from nameless terrors.

It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have
lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. The
storm, with its fury of madly driven ice particles, must have been beyond
anything our expedition had encountered before.
One aëroplane shelter—all, it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy and
inadequate state—was nearly pulverized; and the derrick at the distant
boring was entirely shaken to pieces.
The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was
bruised into a high polish, and two of the small tents were flattened despite
their snow banking. Wooden surfaces left out in the blast were pitted and
denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely
obliterated.
It is also true that we found none of the archæan biological objects in a
condition to take outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals from a
vast, tumbled pile, including several of the greenish soapstone fragments
whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots caused
so many doubtful comparisons, and some fossil bones, among which were
the most typical of the curiously injured specimens.
None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow inclosure near the
camp being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though
the greater breakage, on the side next to the camp, which was not the
windward one, suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic beasts
themselves.

All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to explain that the wind may
have blown them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-melting machinery
at the boring were too badly damaged to warrant salvage, so we used them to
choke up that subtly disturbing gateway to the past which Lake had blasted.
We likewise left at the camp the two most shaken up of the planes; since our
surviving party had only four real pilots—Sherman, Danforth, McTighe, and
Ropes—in all, with Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate. We
brought back all the books, scientific equipment, and other incidentals we
could find, though much was rather unaccountably blown away. Spare tents
and furs were either missing or badly out of condition.
It was approximately four p.m., after wide plane cruising had forced us to
give Gedney up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for
relaying; and I think we did well to keep it as calm and noncommittal as we
succeeded in doing.
The most we said about agitation concerned our dogs, whose frantic
uneasiness near the biological specimens was to be expected from poor
Lake's accounts. We did not mention, I think, their display of the same
uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones and certain
other objects in the disordered region—objects including scientific
instruments, aëroplanes, and machinery, both at the camp and at the boring,
whose parts had been loosened, moved, or otherwise tampered with by
winds that must have harbored singular curiosity and investigativeness.
About the fourteen biological specimens we were pardonably indefinite. We
said that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough was
left of them to prove Lake's description wholly and impressively accurate. It
was hard work keeping our personal emotions out of this matter—and we
did not mention numbers or say exactly how we had found those which we
did find. We had by that time agreed not to transmit anything suggesting
madness on the part of Lake's men, and it surely looked like madness to find
six imperfect monstrosities carefully buried upright in nine-foot snow graves
under five-pointed mounds punched over with groups of dots in patterns
exactly like those on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or
Tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to
have been completely blown away.

We were careful, too, about the public's general peace of mind; hence
Danforth and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the next
day. It was the fact that only a radically lightened plane could possibly cross
a range of such height which mercifully limited that scouting tour to the two
of us.
On our return at one a.m., Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an
admirably stiff upper lip. It took no persuasion to make him promise not to
show our sketches and the other things we brought away in our pockets, not
to say anything more to the others than what we had agreed to relay outside,
and to hide our camera films for private development later on; so that part of
my present story will be as new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman, and
the rest as it will be to that world in general. Indeed—Danforth is closer
mouthed than I: for he saw, or thinks he saw, one thing he will not tell even
me.
As all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent—a confirmation of
Lake's opinion that the great peaks are of archæan slate and other very
primal crumpled strata unchanged since at least middle Comanchean time, a
conventional comment on the regularity of the clinging cube and rampart
formations, a decision that the cave mouths indicate dissolved calcareous
veins, a conjecture that certain slopes and passes would permit of the scaling
and crossing of the entire range by seasoned mountaineers, and a remark that
the mysterious other side holds a lofty and immense superplateau as ancient
and unchanging as the mountains themselves—twenty thousand feet in
elevation, with grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin glacial
layer and with low gradual foothills between the general plateau surface and
the sheer precipices of the highest peaks.
This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely
satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen hours—a
longer time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitering, and rock-
collecting program called for—to a long mythical spell of adverse wind
conditions, and told truly of our landing on the farther foothills.
Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt any of
the others into emulating our flight. Had any tried to do that, I would have
used every ounce of my persuasion to stop them—and I do not know what
Danforth would have done.

While we were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson
had worked like beavers over Lake's two best planes, fitting them again for
use, despite the altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative
mechanism.
We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old
base as soon as possible. Even though indirect, that was the safest way to
work toward McMurdo Sound; for a straight-line flight across the most
utterly unknown stretches of the æon-dead continent would involve many
additional hazards.
Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our tragic decimation and
the ruin of our drilling machinery. The doubts and horrors around us—which
we did not reveal—made us wish only to escape from this austral world of
desolation and brooding madness as swiftly as we could.

As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without
further disasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next
day—January 27th—after a swift nonstop flight; and on the 28th we made
McMurdo Sound in two laps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned
by a faulty rudder, in the furious wind over the ice shelf after we had cleared
the great plateau.
In five days more, the Arkham and Miskatonic, with all hands and equipment
on board, were shaking clear of the thickening field ice and working up Ross
Sea, with the mocking mountains of Victoria Land looming westward
against a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the wind's wails into a wide-
ranged musical piping which chilled my soul to the quick.
Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us and
thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life
and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in
the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet's
scarce-cooled crust.
Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic
exploration, and have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with

splendid unity and faithfulness. Even young Danforth, with his nervous
breakdown, has not flinched or babbled to his doctors.
Indeed, as I have said, there is one thing he thinks he alone saw which he
will not tell even me, though I think it would help his psychological state if
he would consent to do so. It might explain and relieve much, though
perhaps the thing was no more than the delusive aftermath of an earlier
shock. That is the impression I gather after those rare, irresponsible moments
when he whispers disjointed things to me—things which he repudiates
vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on himself again.
It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and some of
our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. We
might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that
the results we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same
age-long pursuit of the unknown.
Lake's reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused naturalists and
palæontologists to the highest pitch, though we were sensible enough not to
show the detached parts we had taken from the actual buried specimens, or
our photographs of those specimens as they were found. We also refrained
from showing the more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish
soapstones; while Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took
or drew on the superplateau across the range, and the crumpled things we
smoothed, studied in terror, and brought away in our pockets.
But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organizing, and with a
thoroughness far beyond anything our outfit attempted—if not dissuaded,
they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till
they bring up that which we know may end the world. So I must break
through all reticences at last—even about that ultimate, nameless thing
beyond the mountains of madness.

IV.
It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to
Lake's camp and what we really found there—and to that other thing beyond
the awful mountain wall.
I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the
disarranged machinery, the varied uneasiness of our dogs, the missing
sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of Gedney,
and the six insanely buried biological specimens, strangely sound in texture
for all their structural injuries, from a world forty million years dead. I do
not recall whether I mentioned that upon checking up the canine bodies we

found one dog missing. We did not think much about that till later—indeed,
only Danforth and I have thought of it at all.
The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to
certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible
kind of rationale to the apparent chaos.
At the time, I tried to keep the men's minds off those points; for it was so
much simpler—so much more normal—to lay everything to an outbreak of
madness on the part of some of Lake's party. From the look of things, that
demon mountain wind must have been enough to drive any man mad in the
midst of this center of all earthly mystery and desolation.
The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies—men
and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were
torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far
as we could judge, had in each case come from strangulation or laceration.
The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for the state of their ill-built
corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within. It had been set some
distance from the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish
archæan organisms, but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain.
When left alone in that monstrous wind, behind flimsy walls of insufficient
height, they must have stampeded—whether from the wind itself, or from
some subtle, increasing odor emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could
not say.

But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I
had better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last—though with a
categorical statement of opinion, based on the first-hand observations and
most rigid deductions of both Danforth and myself, that the then missing
Gedney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found.
I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that
some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded,
and inhuman fashion. It was the same with dogs and men. All the healthier,
fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had their most solid masses of
tissue cut out and removed, as by a careful butcher; and around them was a

strange sprinkling of salt—taken from the ravaged provision chests on the
planes—which conjured up the most horrible associations.
The thing had occurred in one of the crude aëroplane shelters from which the
plane had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced all tracks
which could have supplied any plausible theory. Scattered bits of clothing,
roughly slashed from the human incision subjects, hinted no clues.
It is useless to bring up the half impression of certain faint snow prints in
one shielded corner of the ruined inclosure—because that impression did not
concern human prints at all, but was clearly mixed up with all the talk of
fossil prints which poor Lake had been giving throughout the preceding
weeks. One had to be careful of one's imagination in the lee of those
overshadowing mountains of madness.
As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in the end.
When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs and two
men; but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent, which we entered after
investigating the monstrous graves, had something to reveal.
It was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the primal monstrosity
had been removed from the improvised table. Indeed, we had already
realized that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried things we had
found—the one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful odor—must represent
the collected sections of the entity which Lake had tried to analyze.
On and around that laboratory table were strewn other things, and it did not
take long for us to guess that those things were the carefully, though oddly
and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I shall spare the
feelings of survivors by omitting mention of the man's identity.
Lake's anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidences of
their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it
we found a curious litter of matches. We buried the human parts beside the
other ten men, and the canine parts with the other thirty-five dogs.
Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory table, and on the jumble
of roughly handled illustrated books scattered near it, we were much too
bewildered to speculate.
This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were equally
perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured

biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain instruments, illustrated
technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches and
batteries, food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like,
was utterly beyond sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink
blots on certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien fumbling
and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices both
at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly
disordered machinery.
Then, too, there was the upsetting of the larder, the disappearance of certain
staples, and the jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried open in the most
unlikely ways and at the most unlikely places. The profusion of scattered
matches, intact, broken, or spent, formed another minor enigma—as did the
two or three tent cloths and fur suits which we found lying about with
peculiar and unorthodox slashings conceivably due to clumsy efforts at
unimaginable adaptations.
The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies, and the crazy burial of
the damaged archæan specimens, were all of a piece with this apparent
disintegrative madness. In view of just such an eventuality as the present
one, we carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane disorder at
the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress our pleas against the departure
of the proposed Starkweather-Moore Expedition.

Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and
open the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could
not help noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their
clusters of grouped dots, to poor Lake's descriptions of the strange greenish
soapstones; and when we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the
great mineral pile we found the likeness very close indeed.
The whole general formation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably
suggestive of the starfish head of the archæan entities; and we agreed that
the suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitized minds of
Lake's overwrought party.

For madness—centering in Gedney as the only possible surviving agent—
was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken
utterance was concerned; though I will not be so naïve as to deny that each
of us may have harbored wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate
completely.
Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive aëroplane cruise over
all the surrounding territory in the afternoon, sweeping the horizon with field
glasses in quest of Gedney and of the various missing things; but nothing
came to light.
The party reported that the titan-barrier range extended endlessly to right and
left alike, without any diminution in height or essential structure. On some of
the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations were bolder and
plainer, having doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted Asian hill
ruins. The distribution of cryptical cave mouths on the black snow-denuded
summits seemed roughly even as far as the range could be traced.
In spite of all the prevailing horrors we were left with enough sheer
scientific zeal and adventurousness to wonder about the unknown realm
beyond those mysterious mountains.
As our guarded messages stated, we rested at midnight after our day of terror
and bafflement—but not without a tentative plan for one or more range-
crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with aërial camera and
geologist's outfit, beginning the following morning.
It was decided that Danforth and I try it first, and we awaked at seven a.m.
intending an early trip; though heavy winds—mentioned in our brief bulletin
to the outside world—delayed our start till nearly nine o'clock.
I have already repeated the noncommittal story we told the men at camp—
and relayed outside—after our return sixteen hours later. It is now my
terrible duty to amplify this account by filling in the merciful blanks with
hints of what we really saw in that hidden transmontane world—hints of the
revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a nervous collapse.
I wish he would add a really frank word about the thing which he thinks he
alone saw—even though it was probably a nervous delusion—and which
was perhaps the last straw that put him where he is; but he is firm against
that. All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed whispers about what set him

shrieking as the plane soared back through the wind-tortured mountain pass
after that real and tangible shock which I shared.
This will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving elder horrors in
what I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling with the inner
antarctic—or at least from prying too deeply beneath the surface of that
ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and unhuman, æon-cursed desolation—
the responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immeasurable evils will not be
mine.

Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight
and checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass
in the range lay somewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about
twenty-three thousand or twenty-four thousand feet above sea-level. For this
point, then, we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked on our
flight of discovery.
The camp itself, on foothills which sprang from a high continental plateau,
was some twelve thousand feet in altitude; hence the actual height increase
necessary was not so vast as it might seem. Nevertheless we were acutely
conscious of the rarefied air and intense cold as we rose; for, on account of
visibility conditions, we had to leave the cabin windows open. We were
dressed, of course, in our heaviest furs.
As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the line of
crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and more the
curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and thought again of the
strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich.
The ancient and wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all of Lake's
bulletins, and proved that these pinnacles had been towering up in exactly
the same way since a surprisingly early time in earth's history—perhaps over
fifty million years. How much higher they had once been, it was futile to
guess; but everything about this strange region pointed to obscure
atmospheric influences unfavorable to change, and calculated to retard the
usual climatic processes of rock disintegration.

But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave
mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a field
glass and took aërial photographs while Danforth drove; and at times I
relieved him at the controls—though my aviation knowledge was purely an
amateur's—in order to let him use the binoculars.
We could easily see that much of the material of the things was a lightish
archæan quartzite, unlike any formation visible over broad areas of the
general surface; and that their regularity was extreme and uncanny to an
extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted.
As he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold æons of
savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough material had
saved them from obliteration. Many parts, especially those closest to the
slopes, seemed identical in substance with the surrounding rock surface.
The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Macchu Picchu in the
Andes, or the primal foundation walls of Kish as dug up by the Oxford-Field
Museum Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and I obtained that
occasional impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which Lake had
attributed to his flight-companion Carroll.
How to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and I
felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange
regularities—like the famous Giants' Causeway in Ireland—but this
stupendous range, despite Lake's original suspicion of smoking cones, was
above all else nonvolcanic in evident structure.
The curious cave mouths, near which the odd formation seemed most
abundant, presented another, albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity
of outline. They were, as Lake's bulletin had said, often approximately
square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been shaped to greater
symmetry by some magic hand. Their numerousness and wide distribution
were remarkable, and suggested that the whole region was honeycombed
with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata.
Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within the caverns, but we
saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites. Outside,
those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures seemed invariably
smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the slight cracks and pittings
of the weathering tended toward unusual patterns.

Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the camp,
he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots
sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on
the madly conceived snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities.

We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along toward
the relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally
looked down at the snow and ice of the land route, wondering whether we
could have attempted the trip with the simpler equipment of earlier days.
Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the terrain was far from difficult as
such things go; and that despite the crevasses and other bad spots it would
not have been likely to deter the sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton, or an
Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appeared to lead up to wind-bared passes
with unusual continuity, and upon reaching our chosen pass we found that its
case formed no exception.
Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and
peer out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even
though we had no cause to think the regions beyond the range essentially
different from those already seen and traversed. The touch of evil mystery in
these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed
betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be
explained in literal words. Rather was it an affair of vague psychological
symbolism and æsthetic association—a thing mixed up with exotic poetry
and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden
volumes.
Even the wind's burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and for
a second it seemed that the composite sound included a bizarre musical
whistling, or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in and out of the
omnipresent and resonant cave mouths. There was a cloudy note of
reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of
the other dark impressions.
We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of twenty-three thousand five
hundred and seventy feet according to the aneroid; and had left the region of

clinging snow definitely below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes
and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers—but with those provocative cubes,
ramparts, and echoing cave mouths to add a portent of the unnatural, the
fantastic, and the dreamlike.
Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the one
mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed to be half
lost in a queer antarctic haze—such a haze, perhaps, as had been responsible
for Lake's early notion of volcanism.
The pass loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept between its
jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a sky fretted with
swirling vapors and lighted by the low polar sun—the sky of that mysterious
farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.
A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth and I,
unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced
through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged
eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last few feet, we did indeed
stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets of an
elder and utterly alien earth.

V.
I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror,
and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what
lay beyond. Of course, we must have had some natural theory in the back of
our heads to steady our faculties for the moment. Probably we thought of
such things as the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in
Colorado, or the fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona
desert. Perhaps we even half thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen
the morning before on first approaching those mountains of madness.
We must have had some such normal notions to fall back upon as our eyes
swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless
labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically eurythmic stone masses

which reared their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more
than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest, and in places obviously thinner.
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish
violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a
hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate
deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred
thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of
orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could
possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause.

The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable! Some fiendish
violation of natural law!

We had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any
theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than
natural in origin. How could they be otherwise, when man himself could
scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time when this
region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean
maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all
comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage
in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a
material basis after all—there had been some horizontal stratum of ice dust
in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its image
across the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection. Of course,
the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things
which the real source did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source,
we thought it even more hideous and menacing than its distant image.

It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage—in stark, objective
reality!

Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and
ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in the hundreds
of thousands—perhaps millions—of years it had brooded there amidst the
blasts of a bleak upland. "Corona Mundi—Roof of the World——" All sorts
of fantastic phrases sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily down at the
unbelievable spectacle.
I thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently haunted
me since my first sight of this dead antarctic world—of the demonic plateau
of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men of the Himalayas, of the
Pnakotic Manuscripts with their prehuman implications, of the Cthulhu cult,
of the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless
Tsathoggua and the worse than formless star spawn associated with that
semientity.

For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little
thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base
of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim,
we decided that we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at
the left of the pass through which we had come. We had merely struck, at
random, a limited part of something of incalculable extent.
The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures,
linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and ramparts which
evidently formed its mountain outposts. These latter, as well as the queer
cave mouths, were as thick on the inner as on the outer sides of the
mountains.
The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from ten
to one hundred and fifty feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying
from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark
primordial slate, schist, and sandstone—blocks in many cases as large as 4 ×
6 × 8 feet—though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid,
uneven bed rock of pre-Cambrian slate.

The buildings were far from equal in size, there being innumerable
honeycomb arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate
structures.
The general shape of these things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or
terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters of
cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of angled
edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern
fortifications. The builders had made constant and expert use of the principle
of the arch, and domes had probably existed in the city's heyday.
The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface from
where the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial
débris. Where the glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of
the gigantic piles, and we noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges which
connected the different towers at varying distances above the ground. On the
exposed walls we could detect the scarred places where other and higher
bridges of the same sort had existed.
Closer inspection revealed countless largish windows; some of which were
closed with shutters of a petrified material originally wood, though most
gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion.
Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless, and with uneven though wind-
rounded upper edges; whilst others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal
model or else protected by higher surrounding structures, preserved intact
outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and pitting. With the field glass
we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural decorations in
horizontal bands—decorations including those curious groups of dots whose
presence on the ancient soapstones now assumed a vastly larger significance.
In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice sheet deeply
riven from various geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn
down to the very level of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from
the plateau's interior to a cleft in the foothills about a mile to the left of the
pass we had traversed, was wholly free from buildings. It probably
represented, we concluded, the course of some great river which in Tertiary
times—millions of years ago—had poured through the city and into some
prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly, this was

above all a region of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human
penetration.

Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing this
monstrous survival from æons we had thought prehuman, I can only wonder
that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium which we did. Of course, we
knew that something—chronology, scientific theory, or our own
consciousness—was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the
plane, observe many things quite minutely, and take a careful series of
photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good stead.
In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my
bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant curiosity to
fathom more of this age-old secret—to know what sort of beings had built
and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what relation to the general
world of its time or of other times so unique a concentration of life could
have had.
For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary
nucleus and center of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth's
history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most
obscure and distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene
convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of
apedom.
Here sprawled a Palæogæan megalopolis compared with which the fabled
Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoë in the land
of Lomar are recent things of to-day—not even of yesterday; a megalopolis
ranking with such whispered prehuman blasphemies as Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib in
the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City of Arabia Deserta.
As we flew above that tangle of stark Titan towers my imagination
sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms of fantastic
associations—even weaving links betwixt this lost world and some of my
own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp.
The plane's fuel tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had been only partly
filled; hence we now had to exert caution in our explorations. Even so,

however, we covered an enormous extent of ground—or rather, air—after
swooping down to a level where the wind became virtually negligible.
There seemed to be no limit to the mountain range, or to the length of the
frightful stone city which bordered its inner foothills. Fifty miles of flight in
each direction showed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry
that clawed up corpselike through the eternal ice.
There were, though, some highly absorbing diversifications; such as the
carvings on the canyon where that broad river had once pierced the foothills
and approached its sinking place in the great range.
The headlands at the stream's entrance had been boldly carved into
Cyclopean pylons; and something about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs
stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semiremembrances in both
Danforth and me.
We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public
squares, and noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill
rose, it was generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling stone edifice;
but there were at least two exceptions. Of these latter, one was too badly
weathered to disclose what had been on the jutting eminence, while the other
still bore a fantastic conical monument carved out of the solid rock and
roughly resembling such things as the well-known Snake Tomb in the
ancient valley of Petra.
Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was not of
infinite width, even though its length along the foothills seemed endless.
After about thirty miles the grotesque stone buildings began to thin out, and
in ten more miles we came to an unbroken waste virtually without signs of
sentient artifice. The course of the river beyond the city seemed marked by a
broad, depressed line, while the land assumed a somewhat greater
ruggedness, seeming to slope slightly upward as it receded in the mist-hazed
west.
So far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an attempt at
entering some of the monstrous structures would have been inconceivable.
Accordingly, we decided to find a smooth place on the foothills near our
navigable pass, there grounding the plane and preparing to do some
exploration on foot.

Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with a scattering of ruins,
low flying soon disclosed an ample number of possible landing places.
Selecting that nearest to the pass, since our next flight would be across the
great range and back to camp, we succeeded about twelve thirty p.m. in
coming down on a smooth, hard snow field wholly devoid of obstacles and
well adapted to a swift and favorable take-off later on.

It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for so
brief a time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this level;
hence we merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged, and that the
vital parts of the mechanism were guarded against the cold.
For our foot journey we discarded the heaviest of our flying furs, and took
with us a small outfit consisting of pocket compass, hand camera, light
provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper, geologist's hammer and chisel,
specimen bags, coil of climbing rope, and powerful electric torches with
extra batteries; this equipment having been carried in the plane on the chance
that we might be able to effect a landing, take ground pictures, make
drawings and topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens from some
bare slope, outcropping, or mountain cave.
Fortunately, we had a supply of extra paper to tear up, place in a spare
specimen bag, and use on the ancient principle of hare and hounds for
marking our course in any interior mazes we might be able to penetrate. This
had been brought in case we found some cave system with air quiet enough
to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the usual rock-chipping
method of trail blazing.
Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow, toward the stupendous
stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as
keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the
unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously.
True, we had become visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed
by the barrier peaks; yet the prospect of actually entering primordial walls
reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years ago—before any

known race of men could have existed—was none the less awesome and
potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality.
Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion
somewhat more difficult than usual, both Danforth and I found ourselves
bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to
our lot.
It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level with the
snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge, roofless rampart
still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline, and rising to an irregular
height of ten or eleven feet. For this latter we headed; and when at last we
were actually able to touch its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we
had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with
forgotten æons normally closed to our species.
This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps three hundred feet from point to
point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6 x
8 feet in surface. There was a row of arched loopholes or windows about
four feet wide and five feet high, spaced quite symmetrically along the
points of the star and at its inner angles, and with the bottoms about four feet
from the glaciated surface.
Looking through these, we could see that the masonry was fully five feet
thick, that there were no partitions remaining within, and that there were
traces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior walls—facts we had
indeed guessed before, when flying low over this rampart and others like it.
Though lower parts must have originally existed, all traces of such things
were now wholly obscured by the deep layer of ice and snow at this point.
We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher the
nearly effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated
floor. Our orientation flights had indicated that many buildings in the city
proper were less ice-choked, and that we might perhaps find wholly clear
interiors leading down to the true ground level if we entered those structures
still roofed at the top.
Before we left the rampart we photographed it carefully, and studied its
mortarless Cyclopean masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished that
Pabodie were present, for his engineering knowledge might have helped us

guess how such titanic blocks could have been handled in that unbelievably
remote age when the city and its outskirts were built up.

The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind shrieking
vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the background, was
something of which the smallest details will always remain engraved on my
mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any human beings but Danforth
and me conceive such optical effects.
Between us and the churning vapors of the west lay that monstrous tangle of
dark stone towers, its outré and incredible forms impressing us afresh at
every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid stone, and were it not for
the photographs I would still doubt that such a thing could be. The general
type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart we had examined; but
the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban manifestations
were past all description.
Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless variety,
preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were
geometrical forms for which an Euclid could scarcely find a name—cones of
all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of
provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken
columns in curious groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of
mad grotesqueness.
As we drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the ice
sheet, and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that connected the crazily
sprinkled structures at various heights. Of orderly streets there seemed to be
none, the only broad open swath being a mile to the left, where the ancient
river had doubtless flowed through the town into the mountains.
Our field glasses showed the external, horizontal bands of nearly effaced
sculptures and dot groups to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine
what the city must once have looked like—even though most of the roofs
and tower tops had necessarily perished.
As a whole, it had been a complex tangle of twisted lanes and alleys, all of
them deep canyons, and some little better than tunnels because of the

overhanging masonry or overarching bridges.
Now, outspread below us, it loomed like a dream phantasy against a
westward mist through whose northern end the low, reddish antarctic sun of
early afternoon was struggling to shine; and when, for a moment, that sun
encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary
shadow, the effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict.
Even the faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind in the great mountain
passes behind us took on a wilder note of purposeful malignity.
The last stage of our descent to the town was unusually steep and abrupt, and
a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led us to think that
an artificial terrace had once existed there. Under the glaciation, we
believed, there must be a flight of steps or its equivalent.
When at last we plunged into the town itself, clambering over fallen
masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of
omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such
that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained.
Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began making some offensively irrelevant
speculations about the horror at the camp—which I resented all the more
because I could not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many
features of this morbid survival from nightmare antiquity.
The speculations worked on his imagination, too; for in one place—where a
débris-littered alley turned a sharp corner—he insisted that he saw faint
traces of ground markings which he did not like; whilst elsewhere he
stopped to listen to a subtle, imaginary sound from some undefined point—a
muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain
caves, yet somehow disturbingly different.
The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the
few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we
could not escape, and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious certainty
concerning the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed
place.
Nevertheless, our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead, and
we mechanically carried out our program of chipping specimens from all the

different rock types represented in the masonry. We wished a rather full set
in order to draw better conclusions regarding the age of the place.
Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to date from later than the Jurassic
and Comanchean periods, nor was any piece of stone in the entire place of a
greater recency than the Pliocene age. In stark certainty, we were wandering
amidst a death which had reigned at least five hundred thousand years, and
in all probability even longer.

As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped
at all available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance
possibilities. Some were above our reach, whilst others led only into ice-
choked ruins as unroofed and barren as the rampart on the hill.
One, though spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless abyss
without visible means of descent. Now and then we had a chance to study
the petrified wood of a surviving shutter, and were impressed by the
fabulous antiquity implied in the still discernible grain. These things had
come from Mesozoic gymnosperms and conifers—especially Cretaceous
cycads—and from fan palms and early angiosperms of plainly Tertiary date.
Nothing definitely later than the Pliocene could be discovered.
In the placing of these shutters—whose edges showed the former presence
of queer and long-vanished hinges—usage seemed to be varied—some being
on the outer and some on the inner side of the deep embrasures. They
seemed to have become wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of their
former and probably metallic fixtures and fastenings.
After a time we came across a row of windows—in the bulges of a colossal
five-edged cone of undamaged apex—which led into a vast, well-preserved
room with stone flooring; but these were too high in the room to permit
descent without a rope. We had a rope with us, but did not wish to bother
with this twenty-foot drop unless obliged to—especially in this thin plateau
air where great demands were made upon the heart action.
This enormous room was probably a hall or concourse of some sort, and our
electric torches showed bold, distinct, and potentially startling sculptures
arranged round the walls in broad, horizontal bands separated by equally

broad strips of conventional arabesques. We took careful note of this spot,
planning to enter here unless a more easily gained interior was encountered.
Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an
archway about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end of an
aërial bridge which had spanned an alley about five feet above the present
level of glaciation. These archways, of course, were flush with upper-story
floors, and in this case one of the floors still existed.
The building thus accessible was a series of rectangular terraces on our left
facing westward. That across the alley, where the other archway yawned,
was a decrepit cylinder with no windows and with a curious bulge about ten
feet above the aperture. It was totally dark inside, and the archway seemed to
open on a well of illimitable emptiness.
Heaped débris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly easy,
yet for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the long-wished
chance. For though we had penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery, it
required fresh resolution to carry us actually inside a complete and surviving
building of a fabulous elder world whose nature was becoming more and
more hideously plain to us.
In the end, however, we made the plunge, and scrambled up over the rubble
into the gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate slabs, and
seemed to form the outlet of a long, high corridor with sculptured walls.
Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and realizing the
probable complexity of the nest of apartments within, we decided that we
must begin our system of hare-and-hound trail blazing. Hitherto our
compasses, together with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain range
between the towers in our rear, had been enough to prevent our losing our
way; but from now on, the artificial substitute would be necessary.
Accordingly we reduced our extra paper to shreds of suitable size, placed
these in a bag to be carried by Danforth, and prepared to use them as
economically as safety would allow. This method would probably gain us
immunity from straying, since there did not appear to be any strong air
currents inside the primordial masonry. If such should develop, or if our
paper supply should give out, we could of course fall back on the more
secure though more tedious and retarding method of rock chipping.

Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible to guess
without a trial. The close and frequent connection of the different buildings
made it likely that we might cross from one to another on bridges underneath
the ice, except where impeded by local collapses and geologic rifts, for very
little glaciation seemed to have entered the massive constructions.
Almost all the areas of transparent ice had revealed the submerged windows
as tightly shuttered, as if the town had been left in that uniform state until the
glacial sheet came to crystallize the lower part for all succeeding time.
Indeed, one gained a curious impression that this place had been deliberately
closed and deserted in some dim, bygone æon, rather than overwhelmed by
any sudden calamity or even gradual decay. Had the coming of the ice been
foreseen, and had a nameless population left en masse to seek a less doomed
abode?
The precise physiographic conditions attending the formation of the ice sheet
at this point would have to wait for later solution. It had not, very plainly,
been a grinding drive. Perhaps the pressure of accumulated snows had been
responsible, and perhaps some flood from the river, or from the bursting of
some ancient glacial dam in the great range, had helped to create the special
state now observable. Imagination could conceive almost anything in
connection with this place.

VI.

It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our
wanderings inside that cavernous, æon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry
—that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time,
after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet.
This is especially true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation
came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings. Our flash-light
photographs of those carvings will do much toward proving the truth of what
we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had not a larger film
supply with us. As it was, we made crude notebook sketches of certain
salient features after all our films were used up.

The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness,
and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless
geologic past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls,
but on the lower levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity,
involving curiously irregular differences in floor levels, characterized the
entire arrangement; and we should certainly have been lost at the very outset
but for the trail of torn paper left behind us.
We decided to explore the more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence
climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of some one hundred feet, to where
the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the
polar sky. Ascent was effected over the steep, transversely ribbed stone
ramps or inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of stairs.
The rooms we encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions,
ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. It might be
safe to say that their general average was about 30 x 30 feet in floor area,
and twenty feet in height, though many larger apartments existed.
After thoroughly examining the upper regions and the glacial level we
descended, story by story, into the submerged part, where indeed we soon
saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages
probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular building.
The Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism of everything about us became
curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman
in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional
nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon realized, from
what the carvings revealed, that this monstrous city was many million years
old.
We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous
balancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the function of the
arch was clearly much relied on. The rooms we visited were wholly bare of
all portable contents, a circumstance which sustained our belief in the city's
deliberate desertion. The prime decorative feature was the almost universal
system of mural sculpture, which tended to run in continuous horizontal
bands three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with
bands of equal width given over to geometrical arabesques.

There were exceptions to this rule of arrangement, but its preponderance was
overwhelming. Often, however, a series of smooth cartouches containing
oddly patterned groups of dots would be sunk along one of the arabesque
bands.

The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and æsthetically
evolved to the highest degree of civilized mastery, though utterly alien in
every detail to any known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of
execution no sculpture I have ever seen could approach it. The minutest
details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with
astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the
conventional designs were marvels of skillful intricacy.
The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical principles, and
were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based on the
quantity of five.
The pictorial bands followed a highly formalized tradition, and involved a
peculiar treatment of perspective, but had an artistic force that moved us
profoundly notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods.
Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross
section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical
psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to
compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our
photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque
conceptions of the most daring futurists.
The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines, whose depth
on unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with
dot groups appeared—evidently as inscriptions in some unknown and
primordial language and alphabet—the depression of the smooth surface was
perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps a half inch more. The
pictorial bands were in countersunk low relief, their background being
depressed about two inches from the original wall surface.
In some specimens marks of a former coloration could be detected, though
for the most part the untold æons had disintegrated and banished any

pigments which may have been applied. The more one studied the marvelous
technique the more one admired the things. Beneath their strict
conventionalization one could grasp the minute and accurate observation and
graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves
served to symbolize and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of
every object delineated.
We felt, too, that besides these recognizable excellences there were others
lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions. Certain touches here and there
gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another mental and
emotional background, and a fuller or different sensory equipment, might
have made of profound and poignant significance to us.
The subject matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the
vanished epoch of their creation, and contained a large proportion of evident
history. It is this abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal race—a chance
circumstance operating, through coincidence, miraculously in our favor—
which made the carvings so awesomely informative to us, and which caused
us to place their photography and transcription above all other
considerations.
In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied by the presence of
maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs on an enlarged scale
—these things giving a naïve and terrible corroboration to what we gathered
from the pictorial friezes and dados.
In hinting at what the whole revealed, I can only hope that my account will
not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of those who
believe me at all. It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of
death and horror by the very warning meant to discourage them.

Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-
foot doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks—
elaborately carved and polished—of the actual shutters and doors. All metal
fixtures had long ago vanished, but some of the doors remained in place and
had to be forced aside as we progressed from room to room.

Window frames with odd transparent panes—mostly elliptical—survived
here and there, though in no considerable quantity. There were also frequent
niches of great magnitude, generally empty, but once in a while containing
some bizarre object carved from green soapstone which was either broken or
perhaps held too inferior to warrant removal.
Other apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical
facilities—heating, lighting, and the like—of a sort suggested in many of the
carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been inlaid with
green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors were also paved
with such tiles, though plain stonework predominated.
As I have said, all furniture and other movables were absent; but the
sculptures gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled
these tomblike, echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the floors were
generally thick with detritus, litter, and débris, but farther down this
condition decreased.
In some of the lower chambers and corridors there was little more than gritty
dust or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncanny air of
newly swept immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or collapses had
occurred, the lower levels were as littered as the upper ones.
A central court—as we had seen in other structures, from the air—saved the
inner regions from total darkness; so that we seldom had to use our electric
torches in the upper rooms except when studying sculptured details. Below
the ice cap, however, the twilight deepened; and in many parts of the tangled
ground level there was an approach to absolute blackness.
To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we
penetrated this æon-silent maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate a
hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and impressions.
The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were enough
to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements were
the recent unexplained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too soon
effected by the terrible mural sculptures around us.
The moment we came upon a perfect section of carving, where no ambiguity
of interpretation could exist, it took only a brief study to give us the hideous
truth—a truth which it would be naïve to claim Danforth and I had not
independently suspected before, though we had carefully refrained from

even hinting it to each other. There could now be no further merciful doubt
about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this monstrous
dead city millions of years ago, when man's ancestors were primitive archaic
mammals, and vast Dinosauria roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and
Asia.
We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted—each to
himself—that the omnipresence of the five-pointed motif meant only some
cultural or religious exaltation of the archæan natural object which had so
patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the decorative motifs
of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt the scarabæus, those
of Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribes some
chosen totem animal.
But this lone refuge was now stripped from us, and we were forced to face
definitely the reason-shaking realization which the reader of these pages has
doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in black
and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.

The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of
Dinosauria were not indeed Dinosauria, but far worse. Mere Dinosauria were
new and almost brainless objects—but the builders of the city were wise and
old, and had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well nigh a
thousand million years—rocks laid down before the true life of earth had
advanced beyond plastic groups of cells—rocks laid down before the true
life of earth had existed at all.
They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the
originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic
Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the
great "Old Ones" that had filtered down from the stars when earth was
young—the beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and
whose powers were such as this planet had never bred. And to think that
only the day before Danforth and I had actually looked upon fragments of
their millennially fossilized substance—and that poor Lake and his party had
seen their complete outlines——

It is, of course, impossible for me to relate in proper order the stages by
which we picked up what we know of that monstrous chapter of prehuman
life. After the first shock of the certain revelation, we had to pause a while to
recuperate, and it was fully three o'clock before we got started on our actual
tour of systematic research.
The sculptures in the building we entered were of relatively late date—
perhaps two million years ago—as checked up by geological, biological, and
astronomical features—and embodied an art which would be called decadent
in comparison with that of specimens we found in older buildings, after
crossing bridges under the glacial sheet.
One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly
even fifty million years—to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous—and
contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one
tremendous exception, that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed,
the oldest domestic structure we traversed.
Were it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made public, I
would refrain from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a
madman. Of course, the infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale—
representing the preterrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets,
in other galaxies, and in other universes—can readily be interpreted as the
fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; yet such parts sometimes
involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of
mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others
judge when they see the photographs I shall publish.
Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a
fraction of any connected story, nor did we even begin to come upon the
various stages of that story in their proper order. Some of the vast rooms
were independent units so far as their designs were concerned, whilst in
other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried through a series of
rooms and corridors.
The best of the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss
below even the ancient ground level—a cavern perhaps two hundred feet
square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly been an
educational center of some sort.

There were many provoking repetitions of the same material in different
rooms and buildings, since certain chapters of experience, and certain
summaries or phases of racial history, had evidently been favorites with
different decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions of the
same theme proved useful in settling debatable points and filling up gaps.
I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal. Of
course, we even now have only the barest outline—and much of that was
obtained later on from a study of the photographs and sketches we made.
It may be the effect of this later study—the revived memories and vague
impressions acting in conjunction with his general sensitiveness and with
that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence he will not reveal even to
me—which has been the immediate source of Danforth's present breakdown.
But it had to be; for we could not issue our warning intelligently without the
fullest possible information, and the issuance of that warning is a prime
necessity. Certain lingering influences in that unknown antarctic world of
disordered time and alien natural law make it imperative that further
exploration be discouraged.

VII.
The full story, so far as deciphered, will eventually appear in an official
bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only the salient
highlights in a formless, rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the sculptures
told of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless earth
out of cosmic space—their coming, and the coming of many other alien
entities such as at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering.
They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast membranous
wings—thus oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long ago told me
by an antiquarian colleague. They had lived under the sea a good deal,
building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless
adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of
energy.

Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed man's to-
day, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only
when obliged to.
Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of
mechanized life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects
emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness of organization and
simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to live on a high plane
without the more specialized fruits of artificial manufacture, and even
without garments, except for occasional protection against the elements.
It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they
first created earth life—using available substances according to long-known
methods.
The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various
cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets, having
manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular
protoplasmic masses capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of
temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves
to perform the heavy work of the community.
These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered
about as the "Shoggoths" in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that
mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of
those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.
When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized their simple
food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed other cell
groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry
purposes, extirpating any whose presence became troublesome.
With the aid of the Shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift
prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and
imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on land.
Indeed, the highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land in other parts
of the universe, and probably retained many traditions of land construction.
As we studied the architecture of all these sculptured Palæogæan cities,
including that whose æon-dead corridors we were even then traversing, we
were impressed by a curious coincidence which we have not yet tried to

explain, even to ourselves. The tops of the buildings, which in the actual city
around us had, of course, been weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, were
clearly displayed in the bas-reliefs, and showed vast clusters of needlelike
spires, delicate finials on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin,
horizontal scalloped disks capping cylindrical shafts.
This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous mirage,
cast by a dead city whence such sky-line features had been absent for
thousands and ten of thousands of years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes
across the unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached poor
Lake's ill-fated camp.

Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them
migrated to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had
continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main head
tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the
usual way—the writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen
surfaces.
Those lower down in the ocean depths, though they used a curious
phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their vision with
obscure special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their heads—
senses which rendered all the Old Ones partly independent of light in
emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and writing had changed curiously
during the descent, embodying certain apparently chemical coating
processes—probably to secure phosphorescence—which the bas-reliefs
could not make clear to us.
The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming—using the lateral crinoid
arms—and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles containing the
pseudofeet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary
use of two or more sets of their fan-like folding wings.
On land they locally used the pseudofeet, but now and then flew to great
heights or over long distances with their wings. The many slender tentacles
into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate, flexible,

strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coördination—ensuring the utmost
skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations.
The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressure
of the deepest sea bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few
seemed to die at all except by violence, and their burial places were very
limited. The facts that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-
pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a
fresh pause and recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it.

The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even terrific pressures
were powerless to harm them!

The beings multiplied by means of spores—like vegetable pteridophyta, as
Lake had suspected—but, owing to their prodigious toughness and
longevity, and consequent lack of replacement needs, they did not
encourage the large-scale development of new prothallia except when they
had new regions to colonize.
The young matured swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond
any standard we can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and æsthetic life
was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs
and institutions which I shall describe more fully in my coming monograph.

These varied slightly according to sea or land residence, but had the same
foundations and essentials.
Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic
substances; they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food. They
ate uncooked marine life under the sea, but cooked their viands on land.
They hunted game and raised meat herds—slaughtering with sharp weapons
whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had noted.
They resisted all ordinary temperatures marvelously, and in their natural
state could live in water down to freezing. When the great chill of the
Pleistocene drew on, however—nearly a million years ago—the land
dwellers had to resort to special measures, including artificial heating—
until, at last, the deadly cold appears to have driven them back into the sea.
For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legend said, they had
absorbed certain chemicals and become almost independent of eating,
breathing, or heat conditions—but by the time of the great cold they had
lost track of the method. In any case, they could not have prolonged the
artificial state indefinitely without harm.
Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no
biological basis for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed to
organize large households on the principles of comfortable space-utility and
—as we deduced from the pictured occupations and diversions of
codwellers—congenial mental association.
In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the center of the huge
rooms, leaving all wall spaces free for decorative treatment. Lighting, in the
case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a device probably
electro-chemical in nature.
Both on land and under water they used curious tables, chairs and couches
like cylindrical frames—for they rested and slept upright with folded-down
tentacles—and racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their
books.

Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no
certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw.
There was extensive commerce, both local and between different cities—
certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money.
Probably the smaller of the various greenish soapstones found by our
expedition were pieces of such currency.
Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock
raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also
practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent migration seemed
relatively rare except for the vast colonizing movements by which the race
expanded.
For personal locomotion no external aid was used, since in land, air, and
water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast
capacities for speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden—
Shoggoths under the sea, and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in
the later years of land existence.
These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms—animal and
vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aërial—were the products of unguided
evolution acting on life cells made by the Old Ones, but escaping beyond
their radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked
because they had not come in conflict with the dominant beings.
Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically exterminated.
It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures
a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as
an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human
foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of land cities the huge
stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged
pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to palæontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic
changes and convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of miraculous.
Though few or none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the
Archæan Age, there was no interruption in their civilization or in the
transmission of their records.

Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean, and it
is likely that they came not long after the matter forming the moon was
wrenched from the neighboring South Pacific. According to one of the
sculptured maps, the whole globe was then under water, with stone cities
scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as æons passed.
Another map shows a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole, where it
is evident that some of the beings made experimental settlements, though
their main centers were transferred to the nearest sea bottom.
Later maps, which display this land mass as cracking and drifting, and
sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the
theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly.
With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific, tremendous events
began. Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that was not
the worst misfortune. Another race—a land race of beings shaped like
octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous prehuman spawn of
Cthulhu—soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a
monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea
—a colossal blow in view of the increasing land settlements.
Later, peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn
whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands. New land cities were
founded—the greatest of them in the antarctic, for this region of first arrival
was sacred.
From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the center of the Old Ones'
civilization, and all the cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn were blotted
out.
Then, suddenly, the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them the
frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that the Old Ones
were again supreme on the planet, except for one shadowy fear about which
they did not like to speak.
At a rather later age their cities dotted all the land and water areas of the
globe—hence the recommendation in my coming monograph that some
archæologist make systematic borings with Pabodie's type of apparatus in
certain widely separated regions.

The steady trend down the ages was from water to land—a movement
encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never
wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new
difficulty in breeding and managing the Shoggoths upon which successful
sea life depended.
With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating
new life from inorganic matter had been lost, so that the Old Ones had to
depend on the molding of forms already in existence. On land the great
reptiles proved highly tractable; but the Shoggoths of the sea, reproducing
by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence,
presented for a time a formidable problem.
They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestion of the
Old Ones, and had modeled their tough plasticity into various useful
temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modeling powers were
sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative forms
implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a semistable
brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of
the Old Ones without always obeying it.
Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror
and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous
jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and each averaged
about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a
constantly shifting shape and volume—throwing out temporary
developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in
imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion.
They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the
Permian Age, perhaps one hundred and fifty million years ago, when a
veritable war of resubjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old
Ones. Pictures of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in
which the Shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a marvelously
fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold ages.
The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbance against
the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory. Thereafter

the sculptures showed a period in which Shoggoths were tamed and broken
by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west were tamed by
cowboys.
Though during the rebellion the Shoggoths had shown an ability to live out
of water, this transition was not encouraged—since their usefulness on land
would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble of their
management.
During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a
new invasion from outer space—this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean
creatures—creatures undoubtedly the same as those figuring in certain
whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered in the Himalayas as
the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men.
To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, for the first time since their
terrene advent, to sally forth again into the planetary ether; but, despite all
traditional preparations, found it no longer possible to leave the earth's
atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel had been, it was
now definitely lost to the race.
In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands,
though they were powerless to disturb those in the sea. Little by little the
slow retreat of the elder race to their original antarctic habitat was
beginning.

It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn
and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely
different from that which we know than was the substance of the Old Ones.
They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible
for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally come from even
remoter gulfs of cosmic space.
The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital
properties, were strictly material, and must have had their absolute origin
within the known space-time continuum—whereas the first sources of the
other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath. All this, of course,

assuming that the nonterrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the
invading foes are not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might
have invented a cosmic framework to account for their occasional defeats,
since historical interest and pride obviously formed their chief
psychological element. It is significant that their annals failed to mention
many advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty cultures and
towering ethics figure persistently in certain obscure legends.
The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with
startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain
cases existing science will require revision, while in other cases its bold
deductions are magnificently confirmed.
As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all the
continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which cracked
from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower
surface—an hypothesis suggested by such things as the complimentary
outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the great mountain
chains are rolled and shoved up—receives striking support from this
uncanny source.
Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous of a hundred million or more
years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate
Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe (then the Valusia of
primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic continent.
Other charts—and most significantly one in connection with the founding
fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around us—showed all the
present continents well differentiated. And in the latest discoverable
specimen—dating perhaps from the Pliocene Age—the approximate world
of to-day appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia,
of North America with Europe through Greenland, and of South America
with the antarctic continent through Graham Land.
In the Carboniferous map the whole globe—ocean floor and rifted land
mass alike—bore symbols of the Old Ones' vast stone cities, but in the later
charts the gradual recession toward the antarctic became very plain.
The final Pliocene specimen showed no land cities except on the antarctic
continent and the tip of South America, nor any ocean cities north of the

fiftieth parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge and interest in the northern
world, save for a study of coast lines probably made during long
exploration flights on those fan-like membranous wings, had evidently
declined to zero among the Old Ones.
Destruction of cities through the up-thrust of mountains, the centrifugal
rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea bottom, and
other natural causes was a matter of common record; and it was curious to
observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on.
The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last
general center of the race—built early in the Cretaceous Age after a titanic
earth buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant.
It appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of all, where
reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea bottom. In the new
city—many of whose features we could recognize in the sculptures, but
which stretched fully a hundred miles along the mountain range in each
direction beyond the farthest limits of our aërial survey—there were reputed
to be preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottom
city, which were thrust up to light after long epochs in the course of the
general crumpling of strata.

VIII.
Naturally, Danforth and I studied with special interest and a peculiarly
personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district in
which we were. Of this local material there was naturally a vast abundance.
On the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find a
house of very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a
neighboring rift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying
the story of the region, much beyond the Pliocene map, whence we derived
our last general glimpse of the prehuman world. This was the last place we
examined in detail, since what we found there set upon us a fresh,
immediate objective.

Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all
the corners of earth's globe. Of all existing lands it was infinitely the most
ancient. The conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed
be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which even the mad author of the
Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss.
The great mountain chain was tremendously long—starting as a low range
at Luitpold Land on the coast of Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the
entire continent. The really high part stretched in a mighty arc from about
Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70°, East Longitude 115°, with
its concave side toward our camp and its seaward end in the region of that
long, ice-locked coast whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mawson at
the antarctic circle.
Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of nature seemed disturbingly close
at hand. I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the
sculptures forbid me to say that they are earth's highest. That grim honor is
beyond doubt reserved for something which half the sculptures hesitated to
record at all, whilst others approached it with obvious repugnance and
trepidation.
It seems that there was one part of the ancient land—the first part that ever
rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon and the Old
Ones had seeped down from the stars—which had come to be shunned as
vaguely and namelessly evil. Cities built there had crumbled before their
time, and had been found suddenly deserted.
Then when the first great earth buckling had convulsed the region in the
Comanchean Age, a frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the
most appalling din and chaos—and earth had received her loftiest and most
terrible mountains.
If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have
been much over forty thousand feet high—radically vaster than even the
shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended, it
appeared, from about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°, E.
Longitude 100°—less than three hundred miles away from the dead city, so
that we would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim western distance
had it not been for that vague, opalescent haze. Their northern end must

likewise be visible from the long antarctic circle coast line at Queen Mary
Land.
Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to
those mountains—but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay
beyond. No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the emotions
conveyed in the carvings I prayed that none ever might.
There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them—Queen Mary and
Kaiser Wilhelm Lands—and I thank Heaven no one has been able to land
and climb those hills. I am not as sceptical about old tales and fears as I
used to be, and I do not laugh now at the prehuman sculptor's notion that
lightning paused meaningfully now and then at each of the brooding crests,
and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those terrible pinnacles all
through the long polar night. There may be a very real and very monstrous
meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste.
But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less namelessly
accursed. Soon after the founding of the city the great mountain range
became the seat of the principal temples, and many carvings showed what
grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only
the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts.
In the course of ages the caves had appeared, and had been shaped into
adjuncts of the temples. With the advance of still later epochs all the
limestone veins of the region were hollowed out by ground waters, so that
the mountains, the foothills, and the plains below them were a veritable
network of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic sculptures told
of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the Stygian
sunless sea that lurked at earth's bowels.

This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which
flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains, and
which had formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones' range and flowed
beside that chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten Lands on
Wilkes's coast line. Little by little it had eaten away the limestone hill base

at its turning, till at last its sapping currents reached the caverns of the
ground waters and joined with them in digging a deeper abyss.
Finally its whole bulk emptied into the hollow hills and left the old bed
toward the ocean dry. Much of the later city as we now found it had been
built over that former bed. The Old Ones, understanding what had
happened, and exercising their always keen artistic sense, had carved into
ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where the great stream began
its descent into eternal darkness.
This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly the
one whose extinct course we had seen in our aëroplane survey. Its position
in different carvings of the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as
it had been at various stages of the region's age-long, æon-dead history, so
that we were able to sketch a hasty but careful map of the salient features—
squares, important buildings, and the like—for guidance in further
explorations.
We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was a
million or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures told us
exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs and
landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked like.
It must have had a marvelous and mystic beauty, and as I thought of it I
almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which the city's
inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness and glacial
twilight had choked and weighed on my spirit.
Yet, according to certain carvings the denizens of that city had themselves
known the clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a somber and recurrent
type of scene in which the Old Ones were shown in the act of recoiling
affrightedly from some object—never allowed to appear in the design—
found in the great river and indicated as having been washed down through
waving, vine-draped cycad forests from those horrible westward mountains.
It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that we
obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the city's
desertion. Undoubtedly there must have been many sculptures of the same
age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and aspirations of a
stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain evidence of the

existence of others came to us shortly afterward. But this was the first and
only set we directly encountered.
We meant to look farther later on; but as I have said, immediate conditions
dictated another present objective. There would, though, have been a limit
—for after all hope of a long future occupancy of the place had perished
among the Old Ones, there could not but have been a complete cessation of
mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming of the great
cold which once held most of the earth in thrall, and which has never
departed from the ill-fated poles—the great cold that, at the world's other
extremity, put an end to the fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.
Just when this tendency began in the antarctic it would be hard to say in
terms of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial
periods at a distance of about five hundred thousand years from the present,
but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much earlier. All
quantitative estimates are partly guesswork, but it is quite likely that the
decadent sculptures were made considerably less than a million years ago,
and that the actual desertion of the city was complete long before the
conventional opening of the Pleistocene—five hundred thousand years ago
—as reckoned in terms of the earth's whole surface.

In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation
everywhere, and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old Ones.
Heating devices were shown in the houses, and winter travelers were
represented as muffled in protective fabrics. Then we saw a series of
cartouches—the continuous band arrangement being frequently interrupted
in these late carvings—depicting a constantly growing migration to the
nearest refuges of greater warmth—some fleeing to cities under the sea off
the far-away coast, and some clambering down through networks of
limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the neighboring black abyss of
subterrane waters.
In the end, it seems to have been the neighboring abyss which received the
greatest colonization. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional
sacredness of this special region, but may have been more conclusively

determined by the opportunities it gave for continuing the use of the great
temples on the honeycombed mountains, and for retaining the vast land city
as a place of summer residence and base of communication with various
mines.
The linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by means of
several gradings and improvements along the connecting routes, including
the chiseling of numerous direct tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the
black abyss—sharply down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully
drew, according to our most thoughtful estimates, on the guide map we
were compiling.
It was obvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a reasonable
exploring distance of where we were—both being on the mountainward
edge of the city, one less than a quarter of a mile toward the ancient
rivercourse, and the other perhaps twice that distance in the opposite
direction.
The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places, but
the Old Ones built their new city under water—no doubt because of its
greater certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears to
have been very great, so that the earth's internal heat could insure its
habitability for an indefinite period.
The beings seem to have had no trouble in adapting themselves to part-time
—and eventually, of course, whole-time—residence under water, since they
had never allowed their gill systems to atrophy.
There were many sculptures which showed how they had always frequently
visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually
bathed on the deep bottom of their great river. The darkness of inner earth
could likewise have been no deterrent to a race accustomed to long antarctic
nights.
Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings had a
truly epic quality where they told of the building of the new city in the
cavern sea. The Old Ones had gone about it scientifically—quarrying
insoluble rocks from the heart of the honeycombed mountains, and
employing expert workers from the nearest submarine city to perform the
construction according to the best methods.

These workers brought with them all that was necessary to establish the
new venture—Shoggoth tissue from which to breed stone lifters and
subsequent beasts of burden for the cavern city, and other protoplasmic
matter to mold into phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes.

At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea, its
architecture much like that of the city above, and its workmanship
displaying relatively little decadence because of the precise mathematical
element inherent in building operations.
The newly bred Shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular intelligence,
and were represented as taking and executing orders with marvelous
quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking their
voices—a sort of musical piping over a wide range, if poor Lake's
dissection had indicated aright—and to work more from spoken commands
than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times.
They were, however, kept in admirable control. The phosphorescent
organisms supplied light with vast effectiveness, and doubtless atoned for
the loss of the familiar polar auroras of the outer-world night.
Art and decoration were pursued, though, of course, with a certain
decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realize this falling off themselves, and
in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by
transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their land city,
just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of
their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater splendors than its
own people could create. That the transfer of sculptured blocks had not
been more extensive, was doubtless owing to the fact that the land city was
not at first wholly abandoned.
By the time total abandonment did occur—and it surely must have occurred
before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced—the Old Ones had perhaps
become satisfied with their decadent art—or had ceased to recognize the
superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate, the æon-silent ruins around
us had certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation, though all
the best separate statues, like other movables, had been taken away.

The decadent cartouches and dados telling this story were, as I have said,
the latest we could find in our limited search. They left us with a picture of
the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land city in summer and
the sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading with the sea-bottom
cities off the antarctic coast.
By this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have been recognized,
for the sculptures showed many signs of the cold's malign encroachments.
Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the winter no longer
melted completely even in midsummer.
The saurian live stock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were standing
it none too well. To keep on with the work of the upper world it had become
necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant
Shoggoths to land life—a thing the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant to
do. The great river was now lifeless, and the upper sea had lost most of its
denizens except the seals and whales. All the birds had flown away, save
only the great, grotesque penguins.
What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new
sea-cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal
blackness? Had the subterranean waters frozen at last? To what fate had the
ocean-bottom cities of the outer world been delivered? Had any of the Old
Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice cap? Existing geology shows
no trace of their presence. Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in
the outer land world of the north? Could one be sure of what might or might
not linger, even to this day, in the lightless and unplumbed abysses of
earth's deepest water?
Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of pressure
—and men of the sea have fished up curious objects at times. And has the
killer-whale theory really explained the savage and mysterious scars on
antarctic seals noticed a generation ago by Borchgrevingk?
The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for
their geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a
very early date in the land city's history. They were, according to their
location, certainly not less than thirty million years old, and we reflected
that in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the cavern itself, had had no
existence.

They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation
everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around them, and a great
river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a
far-away tropic ocean.
And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens—especially
about the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake's hideously
ravaged camp. There was something abnormal about that whole business—
the strange things we had tried so hard to lay to somebody's madness—
those frightful graves—the amount and nature of the missing material—
Gedney—the unearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities, and the
queer vital freaks the sculptures now showed the race to have——Danforth
and I had seen a good deal in the last few hours, and were prepared to
believe and keep silent about many appalling and incredible secrets of
primal nature.

IX.

I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a change
in our immediate objective. This, of course, had to do with the chiseled
avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had not known
before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse.
From the evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply
descending walk of about a mile through either of the neighboring tunnels
would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs about the great abyss,
down whose side paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to the rocky shore
of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this fabulous gulf in stark

reality was a lure which seemed impossible of resistance once we knew of
the thing—yet we realized we must begin the quest at once if we expected
to include it in our present trip.
In was now eight p.m., and we had not enough battery replacements to let
our torches burn on forever. We had done so much of our studying and
copying below the glacial level that our battery supply had had at least five
hours of nearly continuous use, and despite the special dry cell formula
would obviously be good for only about four more—though by keeping one
torch unused, except for especially interesting or difficult places, we might
manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that.
It would not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean catacombs, hence
in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further mural
deciphering. Of course, we intended to revisit the place for days and
perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography—curiosity having long
ago gotten the better of horror—but just now we must hasten.
Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were
reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it, but
we did let one large notebook go. If worst came to worst, we could resort to
rock chipping—and, of course, it would be possible, even in case of really
lost direction, to work up to full daylight by one channel or another if
granted sufficient time for plentiful trial and error. So, at last, we set off
eagerly in the indicated direction of the nearest tunnel.
According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired
tunnel mouth could not be much more than a quarter of a mile from where
we stood; the intervening space showing solid-looking buildings quite
likely to be penetrable still at a subglacial level. The opening itself would be
in the basement—on the angle nearest the foothills—of a vast five-pointed
structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial nature, which we tried
to identify from our aërial survey of the ruins.
No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we
concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had been
totally shattered in an ice rift we had noticed. In the latter case the tunnel
would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would have to try the next
nearest one—the one less than a mile to the north.

The intervening river course prevented our trying any of the more southern
tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighboring ones were
choked it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on
the next northerly one—about a mile beyond our second choice.

As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and
compass—traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or
preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and
clambering down again, encountering choked doorways and piles of débris,
hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate
stretches, taking false leads and retracing our way (in such cases removing
the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while striking the bottom of
an open shaft through which daylight poured or trickled down—we were
repeatedly tantalized by the sculptured walls along our route.
We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel's
mouth—having crossed a second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the
tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor especially rich in
decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of late
workmanship—when, about eight thirty p.m., Danforth's keen young
nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual.
If we had had a dog with us, I suppost we would have been warned before.
At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly
crystal-pure air, but after a few seconds our memories reached only too
definitely. Let me try to state the thing without flinching. There was an odor
—and that odor was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had
nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had
dissected.
Of course, the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now.
There were several conceivable explanations, and we did a good deal of
indecisive whispering. Most important of all, we did not retreat without
further investigation; for having come this far, we were loath to be balked
by anything short of certain disaster.

Anyway, what we must have suspected was altogether too wild to believe.
Such things did not happen in any normal world. It was probably sheer
irrational instinct which made us dim our single torch—tempted no longer
by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from the
oppressive walls—and which softened our progress to a cautious tiptoeing
and crawling over the increasingly littered floor and heaps of débris.
Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewise
he who first noticed the queer aspect of the débris after we had passed many
half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors on the ground level.
It did not look quite as it ought after countless thousands of years of
desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more light we saw that a kind
of swath seemed to have been lately tracked through it. The irregular nature
of the latter precluded any definite marks, but in the smoother places there
were suggestions of the dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there
was a hint of parallel tracks, as if of runners. This was what made us pause
again.
It was during that pause that we caught—simultaneously this time—the
other odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a more
frightful odor—less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this
place under the known circumstances—unless, of course, Gedney——For
the odor was the plain and familiar one of common petrol—every-day
gasoline.

Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We
knew now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have
crawled into this nighted burial place of the æons, hence could not doubt
any longer the existence of nameless conditions—present or at least recent
—just ahead. Yet in the end we did let sheer burning curiosity—or anxiety
—or autohypnotism—or vague thoughts of responsibility toward Gedney—
of what not—drive us on.
Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen at the alley
turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical piping—potentially of
tremendous significance in the light of Lake's dissection report, despite its

close resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks—which he
thought he had shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths below.
I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left—of what had
disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have
conceived the inconceivable—a wild trip across the monstrous mountains
and a descent into the unknown, primal masonry——
But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything
definite. We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed
that a trace of deeply filtered upper daylight kept the blackness from being
absolute.
Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by
occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed débris formed an
impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger.
More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet, until very soon we
saw that the forward way was about to cease. We had been all too correct in
our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from the air. Our tunnel quest
was a blind one, and we were not even going to be able to reach the
basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened.
The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carved walls of the blocked
corridor in which we stood, showed several doorways in various states of
obstruction; and from one of them the gasoline odor—quite submerging that
other hint of odor—came with especial distinctness. As we looked more
steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a slight and recent
clearing away of débris from that particular opening. Whatever the lurking
horror might be, we believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly
manifest. I do not think any one will wonder that we waited an appreciable
time before making any further motion.
And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first impression
was one of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured
crypt—a perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet—there remained no
recent object of instantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively,
though in vain, for a farther doorway.
In another moment, however, Danforth's sharp vision had discovered a
place where the floor débris had been disturbed. We turned on both torches

full strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually simple and
trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because of what it implied.
It was a rough leveling of the débris, upon which several small objects lay
carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount of
gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odor even at
this extreme superplateau altitude. In other words, it could not be other than
a sort of camp—a camp made by questing beings who, like us, had been
turned back by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.
Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was
concerned, all from Lake's camp, and consisted of: tin cans as queerly
opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches,
three illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle
with its pictorial and instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some
oddly snipped fragments of fur and tent cloth, a used electric battery with
circular of directions, a folder that came with our type of tent heater, and a
sprinkling of crumpled papers.
It was all bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at
what was on them we felt we had come to the worst. We had found certain
inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet
the effect of the sight, down there in the prehuman vaults of a nightmare
city, was almost too much to bear.

A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those
found on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-
pointed grave mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably
have prepared rough, hasty sketches—varying in their accuracy—or lack of
it—which outlined the neighboring parts of the city and traced the way
from a circularly represented place outside our previous route—a place we
identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast circular
gulf glimpsed in our aërial survey—to the present five-pointed structure and
the tunnel mouth therein.
He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were
quite obviously compiled, as our own had been, from late sculptures

somewhere in the glacial labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had
seen and used. But what this art-blind bungler could never have done was to
execute those sketches in a strange and assured technique perhaps superior,
despite haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings from which
they were taken—the characteristic and unmistakable technique of the Old
Ones themselves in the dead city's heyday.
There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for
our lives after that; since our conclusions were now—notwithstanding their
wildness—completely fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention to
those who have read my account as far as this. Perhaps we were mad—for
have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I
think I can detect something of the same spirit—albeit in a less extreme
form—in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to
photograph them or study their habits. Half paralyzed with terror though we
were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and
curiosity which triumphed in the end.
Of course, we did not mean to face that—or those—which we knew had
been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this
time have found the other neighboring entrance to the abyss, and have
passed within, to whatever night-black fragments of the past might await
them in the ultimate gulf—the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that
entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the north seeking
another. They were, we remembered, partly independent of light.
Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form
our new emotions took—just what change of immediate objective it was
that so sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to
face what we feared—yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking,
unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage point.
Probably we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though
there was interposed a new goal in the form of that great circular place
shown on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at once recognized
it as a monstrous cylindrical tower in the carvings, but appearing only as a
prodigious, round aperture from above.
Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these hasty
diagrams, made us think that its subglacial levels must still form a feature

of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet
unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible age, according to the
sculptures in which it figured—being indeed among the first things built in
the city. Its carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant.
Moreover, it might form a good present link with the upper world—a
shorter route than the one we were so carefully blazing and probably that by
which those others had descended.

At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches—which
quite perfectly confirmed our own—and start back over the indicated
course to the circular place; the course which our nameless predecessors
must have traversed twice before us. The other neighboring gate to the
abyss would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our journey—during which
we continued to leave an economical trail of paper—for it was precisely the
same in kind as that by which we had reached the cul-de-sac, except that it
tended to adhere more closely to the ground level and even descend to
basement corridors.
Every now and then we could trace certain disturbing marks in the débris or
litter underfoot; and, after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline
scent, we were again faintly conscious—spasmodically—of that more
hideous and more persistent scent. After the way had branched from our
former course, we sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive
sweep along the walls; noting in almost every case the well-nigh
omnipresent sculptures, which indeed seem to have formed a main æsthetic
outlet for the Old Ones.
About nine-thirty p.m., while traversing a vaulted corridor whose
increasingly glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and
whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight
ahead and were able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were coming
to the vast, circular place, and that our distance from the upper air could not
be very great.
The corridor ended in an arch, surprisingly low for these megalithic ruins,
but we could see much through it even before we emerged. Beyond, there

stretched a prodigious round space—fully two hundred feet in diameter—
strewn with débris and containing many choked archways corresponding to
the one we were about to cross. The walls were—in available spaces—
boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic proportions; and displayed,
despite the destructive weathering caused by the openness of the spot, an
artistic splendor far beyond anything we had encountered before. The
littered floor was quite heavily glaciated, and we fancied that the true
bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.
But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which, eluding
the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally up
the stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart of those once
climbing outside the monstrous towers or zikkurats of antique Babylon.
Only the rapidity of our flight, and the perspective which confounded the
descent with the tower's inner wall, had prevented our noticing this feature
from the air, and thus caused us to seek another avenue to the subglacial
level.
Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of engineering held it in
place, but Danforth and I could merely admire and marvel. We could see
mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there, but what we saw seemed
inadequate to the function performed. The thing was excellently preserved
up to the present top of the tower—a highly remarkable circumstance in
view of its exposure—and its shelter had done much to protect the bizarre
and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.

As we stepped out into the awesome half daylight of this monstrous
cylinder bottom—fifty million years old, and without doubt the most
primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes—we saw that the ramp-
traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet.
This, we recalled from our aërial survey, meant an outside glaciation of
some forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had seen from the plane had
been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot mound of crumbled
masonry, somewhat sheltered for three fourths of its circumference by the
massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins. According to the sculptures

the original tower had stood in the center of an immense circular plaza, and
had been perhaps five hundred or six hundred feet high, with tiers of
horizontal disks near the top, and a row of needlelike spires along the upper
rim.
Most of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward—a
fortunate happening, since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered
and the whole interior choked. As it was, the ramp showed sad battering;
whilst the choking was such that all the archways seemed to have been half
cleared.
It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by
which those others had descended, and that this would be the logical route
for our own ascent, despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere.
The tower's mouth was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane
than was the great terraced building we had entered, and any further
subglacial exploration we might make on this trip would lie in this general
region.
Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips—even after all we
had seen and guessed. Then, as we picked our way cautiously over the
débris of the great floor, there came a sight which for the time excluded all
other matters.
It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the
ramp's lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto been
screened from our view. There they were—the three sledges missing from
Lake's camp—shaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible
dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and débris, as well as
much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places.
They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and contained
things memorably familiar enough: the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument
cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and some
bulging with less obvious contents—everything derived from Lake's
equipment.
After what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared
for this encounter. The really great shock came when we stepped over and
undid one tarpaulin, whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems

that others as well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical
specimens; for there were two here, both stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved,
patched with adhesive plaster where some wounds around the neck had
occurred, and wrapped with care to prevent further damage. They were the
bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog.

X.
Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking
about the northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our somber
discovery, and I am not prepared to say that we would have immediately
revived such thoughts but for a specific circumstance which broke in upon
us and set up a whole new train of speculations.
We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing in a
kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our
consciousness—the first sounds we had heard since descending out of the
open where the mountain wind whined faintly from its unearthly heights.
Well-known and mundane though they were, their presence in this remote
world of death was more unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or
fabulous tones could possibly have been—since they gave a fresh upsetting
to all our notions of cosmic harmony.
Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range,
which Lake's dissection report had led us to expect in those others—and
which, indeed, our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind
howl we had heard since coming on the camp horror—it would have had a
kind of hellish congruity with the æon-dead region around us. A voice from
other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs.
As it was, however, the noise shattered all our profoundly seated
adjustments—all out tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste
utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life.
What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder
earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a
monstrous response. Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so

unerringly familiarized by our sea days off Victoria Land and our camp
days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of it here, where such
things ought not to be. To be brief—it was simply the raucous squawking of
a penguin.
The muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses nearly opposite to the
corridor whence we had come—regions manifestly in the direction of that
other tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a living water bird in such a
direction—in a world whose surface was one of age-long and uniform
lifelessness—could lead to only one conclusion; hence our first thought was
to verify the objective reality of the sound. It was, indeed, repeated, and
seemed at times to come from more than one throat.
Seeking its source, we entered an archway from which much débris had
been cleared; resuming our trail blazing—with an added paper supply taken
with curious repugnance from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledges—
when we left daylight behind.
As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned
some curious, dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a
sort whose description would be only too superfluous. The course indicated
by the penguin cries was precisely what our map and compass prescribed as
an approach to the more northerly tunnel mouth, and we were glad to find
that a bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels seemed
open.
The tunnel, according to the chart, ought to start from the basement of a
large pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely to recall from our
aërial survey as remarkably well-preserved. Along our path the single torch
showed a customary profusion of carvings, but we did not pause to examine
any of these.

Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the
second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds
from earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left
their supplies in the great circular place, must have planned to return after

their scouting trip toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all
caution concerning them as completely as if they had never existed.
This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realize
at once that it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and,
according to the sculptures, their motion over land surfaces was a swift,
assured matter despite the queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment.
But to say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain.
We were indeed clutched for an instant by a primitive dread almost sharper
than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others.
Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral
archway to our left, to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in
raucous tones. For it was only a penguin—albeit of a huge, unknown
species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous
in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.
When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our
torches on the indifferent and unheeding group of three, we saw that they
were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species.
Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old
Ones' sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they were
descended from the same stock—undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to
some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their
pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits.
That their present habitat was the vast abyss we sought, was not for a
moment to be doubted; and this evidence of the gulf's continued warmth
and habitability filled us with the most curious and subtly perturbing
fancies.
We wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of their
usual domain. The state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that
it had at no time been a habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest
indifference of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any passing
party of those others should have startled them.
Was it possible that those others had taken some aggressive notion or tried
to increase their meat supply? We doubted whether that pungent odor which
the dogs had hated could cause an equal antipathy in these penguins; since

their ancestors had obviously lived on excellent terms with the Old Ones—
an amicable relationship which must have survived in the abyss below as
long as any of the Old Ones remained.
Regretting—in a flare-up of the old spirit of pure science—that we could
not photograph these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them to their
squawking and pushed on toward the abyss whose openness was now so
positively proved to us, and whose exact direction occasional penguin
tracks made clear.

Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly
sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel
mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins.
Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp
involuntarily—a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep underground,
fully a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with low archways
opening around all parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning
cavernously with a black, arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the
vault to a height of nearly fifteen feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss.
In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively though
decadently carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, a few
albino penguins waddled—aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The
black tunnel yawned indefinitely off at a steep, descending grade, its
aperture adorned with grotesquely chiseled jambs and lintel.
From that cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air and
perhaps even a suspicion of vapor proceeded; and we wondered what living
entities other than penguins the limitless void below, and the contiguous
honeycombings of the land and the titan mountains, might conceal.
We wondered, too, whether the trace of mountaintop smoke at first
suspected by poor Lake, as well as the odd haze we had ourselves perceived
around the rampart-crowned peak, might not be caused by the tortuous-
channeled rising of some such vapor from the unfathomed regions of earth's
core.

Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was—at least at the start—about
fifteen feet each way—sides, floor, and arched roof composed of the usual
megalithic masonry. The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of
conventional designs in a later, decadent style; and all the construction and
carving were marvellously well-preserved.
The floor was quite clear, except for a slight detritus bearing outgoing
penguin tracks and the inward tracks of those others. The farther one
advanced, the warmer it became; so that we were soon unbuttoning our
heavy garments. We wondered whether there were any actually igneous
manifestations below, and whether the waters of that sunless sea were hot.
After a short distance the masonry gave place to solid rock, though the
tunnel kept the same proportions and presented the same aspect of carved
regularity. Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that grooves
were cut in the floor.
Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in
our diagrams; none of them such as to complicate the problem of our return,
and all of them welcome as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome
entities on their way back from the abyss.
The nameless scent of such things was very distinct. Doubtless it was
suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the known conditions,
but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most
suspect—indeed, it was just such a lure which had brought us to this
unearthly polar waste in the first place.
We saw several penguins as we passed along, and speculated on the
distance we would have to traverse. The carvings had led us to expect a
steep downhill walk of about a mile to the abyss, but our previous
wanderings had shown us that matters of scale were not wholly to be
depended on.
After about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly
accentuated, and we kept very careful track of the various lateral openings
we passed. There was no visible vapor as at the mouth, but this was
doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air. The temperature was
rapidly ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a careless heap
of material shudderingly familiar to us. It was composed of furs and tent

cloths taken from Lake's camp, and we did not pause to study the bizarre
forms into which the fabrics had been slashed.
Slightly beyond this point we noticed a decided increase in the size and
number of the side galleries, and concluded that the densely honeycombed
region beneath the higher foothills must now have been reached.
The nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another and scarcely less
offensive odor—of what nature we could not guess, though we thought of
decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterrane fungi.
Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the carvings had
not prepared us—a broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-looking
elliptical cavern with a level floor, some seventy-five feet long and fifty
broad, and with many immense side passages leading away into cryptical
darkness.

Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both
torches suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of
several walls between adjacent honeycombings. The walls were rough, and
the high, vaulted roof was thick with stalactites; but the solid rock floor had
been smoothed off, and was free from all débris, detritus, or even dust to a
positively abnormal extent.
Except for the avenue through which we had come, this was true of the
floors of all the great galleries opening off from it; and the singularity of the
condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling.
The curious new fetor which had supplemented the nameless scent was
excessively pungent here; so much so that it destroyed all trace of the other.
Something about this whole place, with its polished and almost glistening
floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any of the
monstrous things we have previously encountered.
The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, prevented all confusion as
to the right course amidst this plethora of equally great cave mouths.
Nevertheless we resolved to resume our paper trail blazing if any further

complexity should develop; for dust tracks, of course, could no longer be
expected.
Upon resuming our direct progress we cast a beam of torchlight over the
tunnel walls—and stopped short in amazement at the supremely radical
change which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage. We
realized, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones' sculpture at the
time of the tunneling, and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of
the arabesques in the stretches behind us.
But now, in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden
difference wholly transcending explanation—a difference in basic nature as
well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a
degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline
could have led one to expect it.
This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in
delicacy of detail. It was countersunk with exaggerated depth in bands
following the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier
sections, but the height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general
surface.
Danforth had the idea that it was a second carving—a sort of palimpsest
formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In nature it was wholly
decorative and conventional, and consisted of crude spirals and angles
roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet
seeming more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition.
Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we
resumed our advance after a cursory look.
We saw and heard fewer penguins, but thought we caught a vague suspicion
of an infinitely distant chorus of them somewhere deep within the earth.
The new and inexplicable odor was abominably strong, and we could detect
scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent.
Puffs of visible vapor ahead bespoke increasing contrasts in temperature,
and the relative nearness of the sunless sea cliffs of the great abyss. Then,
quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead
—obstructions which were quite definitely not penguins—and turned on
our second torch after making sure that the objects were quite stationary.

XI.

Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to
proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some
experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and
leave only such added sensitiveness that memory re-inspired all the original
horror.
We saw, as I have said, certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead; and
I may add that our nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously by a very
curious intensification of the strange, prevailing fetor, now quite plainly
mixed with the nameless stench of those others which had gone before us.
The light of the second torch left no doubt of what the obstructions were,
and we dared approach them only because we could see, even from a
distance, that they were quite as past all harming power as had been the six
similar specimens unearthed from the monstrous star-mounded graves at
poor Lake's camp.
They were, indeed, as lacking in completeness as most of those we had
unearthed—though it grew plain from the thick, dark-green pool gathering
around them that their incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency.
There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake's bulletins would have
suggested no less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us.
To find them in this state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what
sort of monstrous struggle had occurred down here in the dark.
Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks; and our
ears now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those
others disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? The
obstructions did not suggest it, for penguin beaks against the tough tissues
Lake had dissected could hardly account for the terrible damage our
approaching glance was beginning to make out. Besides, the huge blind
birds we had seen appeared to be singularly peaceful.
Had there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent
four responsible? If so, where were they? Were they close at hand and likely
to form an immediate menace to us? We glanced anxiously at some of the

smooth-floored lateral passages as we continued our slow and frankly
reluctant approach.
Whatever the conflict was, it had clearly been that which had frightened the
penguins into their unaccustomed wandering. It must, then, have arisen near
that faintly heard rookery in the incalculable gulf beyond, since there were
no signs that any birds had normally dwelt here.
Perhaps, we reflected, there had been a hideous running fight, with the
weaker party seeking to get back to the cached sledges when their pursuers
finished them. One could picture the demonic fray between namelessly
monstrous entities as it surged out of the black abyss with great clouds of
frantic penguins squawking and scurrying ahead.
I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions
slowly and reluctantly. Would to Heaven we had never approached them at
all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the
greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the
things they had superseded—run back, before we had seen what we did see,
and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us
breathe easily again!

Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon
realized the dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed,
twisted, and ruptured as they were, their chief common injury was total
decapitation.
From each one the tentacled starfish head had been removed; and as we
drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like some
hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage.
Their noisome dark-green ichor formed a large, spreading pool; but its
stench was half overshadowed by that newer and stranger stench, here more
pungent than at any other point along our route.
Only when we had come very close to the sprawling obstructions could we
trace that second, unexplainable fetor to any immediate source—and the
instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures of

the Old Ones' history in the Permian Age one hundred and fifty million
years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which echoed hysterically
through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil, palimpsest carvings.
I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those primal
sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist
had suggested that hideous slime coating found on certain incomplete and
prostrate Old Ones—those whom the frightful Shoggoths had
characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great war
of resubjugation.
They were infamous, nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old,
bygone things; for Shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human
beings or portrayed by any beings.
The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that none
had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had ever
conceived them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms
and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—
rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of
suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more
intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative! Great
Heaven! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to
use and to carve such things?
And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively
iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and
stank obscenely with that new, unknown odor whose cause only a diseased
fancy could envisage—clung to those bodies and sparkled less
voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly resculptured wall in a
series of grouped dots—we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its
uttermost depths.
It was not fear of those four missing others—for all too well did we suspect
they would do no harm again. Poor devils! After all, they were not evil
things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of
being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them—as it will on any others
that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that
hideously dead or sleeping polar waste—and this was their tragic
homecoming.

They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they done? That
awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by
the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them
and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and
paraphernalia! Poor Lake. Poor Gedney. And poor Old Ones! Scientists to
the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place?
Lord, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible,
just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less
incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they
had been, they were men!

They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once
worshiped and roamed among the tree ferns. They had found their dead city
brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done.
They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness
they had never seen—and what had they found?
All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we
looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome
palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot groups of fresh slime on the
wall beside them—looked and understood what must have triumphed and
survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that nighted, penguin-
fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch
pallidly as if in answer to Danforth's hysterical scream.
The shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen
us into mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations
that we have learned of the complete identity of our thoughts at that
moment.
It seemed æons that we stood there, but actually it could not have been
more than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled forward as
if veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulk—and then came a
sound which upset much of what we had just decided, and in so doing broke
the spell and enabled us to run like mad past squawking, confused penguins
over our former trail back to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors

to the great open circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied,
automatic plunge for the sane outer air and light of day.

And then came a sound—a horrible sound—which enabled us to run like
mad for the sane outer air——

The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided;
because it was what poor Lake's dissection had led us to attribute to those
we had just judged dead. It was, Danforth later told me, precisely what he
had caught in infinitely muffled form when at that spot beyond the alley

corner above the glacial level; and it certainly had a shocking resemblance
to the wind pipings we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves.
At the risk of seeming puerile I will add another thing, too, if only because
of the surprising way Danforth's impression chimed with mine. Of course,
common reading is what prepared us both to make the interpretation,
though Danforth has hinted at queer notions about unsuspected and
forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing his
"Arthur Gordon Pym" a century ago.
It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of unknown
but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic and
screamed eternally by the gigantic, spectrally snowy birds of that malign
region's core. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" That, I may admit, is exactly what we
thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing
white mist—that insidious, musical piping over a singularly wide range.

We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered,
though we knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any
scream-roused and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a
moment if it really wished to do so.
We had a vague hope, however, that nonaggressive conduct and a display of
kindred reason might cause such a being to spare us in case of capture, if
only from scientific curiosity.
After all, if such a one had nothing to fear for itself it would have no motive
in harming us. Concealment being futile at this juncture, we used our torch
for a running glance behind, and perceived that the mist was thinning.
Would we see at last, a complete and living specimen of those others?
Again came that insidious musical piping—"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
Then, noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer, it occurred to us
that the entity might be wounded. We could take no chances, however, since
it was very obviously approaching in answer to Danforth's scream, rather
than in flight from any other entity. The timing was too close to admit of
doubt.

Of the whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable nightmare
—that fetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race
had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to recarve and squirm
through the burrows of the hills—we could form no guess; and it cost us a
genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old One—perhaps a lone
survivor—to the peril of recapture and a nameless fate.
Thank Heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened
again, and was driving ahead with increased speed; whilst the straying
penguins in our rear were squawking and screaming and displaying signs of
a panic really surprising in view of their relatively minor confusion when
we had passed them.
Once more came that sinister, wide-ranged piping—"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
We had been wrong. The thing was not wounded, but had merely paused on
encountering the bodies of its fallen kindred and the hellish slime
inscription above them. We could never know what that demon message
was—but those burials at Lake's camp had shown how much importance
the beings attached to their dead.
Our recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us the large open cavern
where various ways converged, and we were glad to be leaving those
morbid palimpsest sculptures—almost felt even when scarcely seen—
behind.
Another thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility
of losing our pursuer at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were
several of the blind albino penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear
that their fear of the oncoming entity was extreme to the point of
unaccountability.
If at that point we dimmed our torch to the very lowest limit of traveling
need, keeping it strictly in front of us, the frightened squawking motions of
the huge birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our true course,
and somehow set up a false lead.
Amidst the churning, spiraling fog, the littered and unglistening floor of the
main tunnel beyond this point, as differing from the other morbidly polished
burrows, could hardly form a highly distinguishing feature; even, so far as

we could conjecture, for those indicated special senses which made the Old
Ones partly, though imperfectly, independent of light in emergencies.
In fact, we were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our
haste. For we had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead
city; since the consequences of loss in those unknown foothill
honeycombings would be unthinkable.
The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did
take a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The
penguins alone could not have saved us, but in conjunction with the mist
they seem to have done so. Only a benign fate kept the curling vapors thick
enough at the right moment, for they were constantly shifting and
threatening to vanish.
Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we emerged from the
nauseously resculptured tunnel into the cave; so that we actually caught one
first and only half glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final,
desperately fearful glance backward before dimming the torch and mixing
with the penguins in the hope of dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened
us was benign, that which gave us the half glimpse was infinitely the
opposite; for to that flash of semivision can be traced a full half of the
horror which has ever since haunted us.

Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the
immemorial instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its
pursuer; or perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a subconscious
question raised by one of our senses.
In the midst of our flight, with all our faculties centered on the problem of
escape, we were in no condition to observe and analyze details; yet even so
our latent brain cells must have wondered at the message brought them by
our nostrils. Afterward, we realized what it was—that our retreat from the
fetid slime coating on those headless obstructions, and the coincident
approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of
stenches which logic called for.

In the neighborhood of the prostrate things that new and lately
unexplainable fetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to
have largely given place to the nameless stench associated with those
others. This it had not done—for instead, the newer and less bearable smell
was now virtually undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously
insistent each second.
So we glanced back—simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the
incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so
we flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either
from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but
equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light
and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth center ahead.
Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more dearly
for a backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping
—"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of
the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant a hysterical formula in
which I alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance.
It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins;
reverberated through the vaulting ahead, and—thank Heaven—through the
now empty vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at once—else we
would not have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a
shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.
"South Station Under—Washington Under—Park Street Under—Kendall—
Central—Harvard——" The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations
of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native
soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had
neither irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew
unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it.
We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible
moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had
formed a clear idea. What we did see—for the mists were indeed all too
malignly thinned—was something altogether different, and immeasurably
more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the
fantastic novelist's 'thing that should not be'; and its nearest comprehensible

analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station
platform—the great black front looming colossally out of infinite
subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling
the prodigious burrow.
But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the
nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward
through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a
spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor.
It was a terrible, indescribable thing, vaster than any subway train—a
shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and
with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of
greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us,
crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it
and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.
Still came that eldritch, mocking cry—"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" And at last we
remembered that the demonic Shoggoths—given life, though, and plastic
organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that
which the dot groups expressed—had likewise no voice save the imitated
accents of their bygone masters.

XII.
Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured
hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms
and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream fragments
involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion.
There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from those
buried epochs; for as we wound our panting way up the sixty-foot cylinder
of primal masonry we glimpsed beside us a continuous procession of heroic
sculptures in the dead race's early and undecayed technique—a farewell
from the Old Ones, written fifty million years ago.

Finally, scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound of
tumbled blocks, with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward,
and the brooding peaks of the great mountains showing beyond the more
crumbled structures toward the east.
The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice vapors,
and the cold clutched at our vitals.
In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the
foothills—the probable ancient terrace—by which we had descended, and
could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on the
rising slope ahead.
Halfway uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing spell,
and turned to look again at the fantastic tangle of incredible stone shapes
below us—once more outlined mystically against an unknown west. As we
did so we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning haziness; the restless
ice vapors having moved up to the zenith, where their mocking outlines
seemed on the point of settling into some bizarre pattern which they feared
to make quite definite or conclusive.

There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque
city a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights
loomed dreamlike against the beckoning rose color of the western sky. Up
toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land, the depressed
course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow.
For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic
beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this far
violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden
land—highest of earth's peaks and focus of earth's evil; harborers of
nameless horrors and Archæan secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who
feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living thing of earth, but
visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the
plains in the polar night.

If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told truly,
these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than three hundred
miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence jut above
that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien
planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens.
Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the
great bygone river had washed down into the city from their accursed
sloping—and wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain in
the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently.
I recalled how their northerly end must come near the coast at Queen Mary
Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition was
doubtless working less than a thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil
fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what might lie
beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed a measure of my
overwrought condition at the time—and Danforth seemed to be even worse.
Yet before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane
our fears had become transferred to the lesser, but vast enough, range whose
re-crossing lay ahead of us.
From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and
hideously against the east, again reminding us of those strange Asian
paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the damnable
honeycombings inside them, and of the frightful amorphous entities that
might have pushed their fetidly squirming sway even to the topmost hollow
pinnacles, we could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by
those suggestive skyward cave mouths where the wind made sounds like an
evil musical piping over a wide range.
To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several
of the summits—as poor Lake must have done when he made that early
mistake about volcanism—and thought shiveringly of that kindred mist
from which we had just escaped—of that, and of the blasphemous, horror-
fostering abyss whence all such vapors came.

All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying
furs. Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a very
smooth take-off over the nightmare city.
At a very high level there must have been great disturbance, since the ice-
dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things; but at
twenty-four thousand feet, the height we needed for the pass, we found
navigation quite practicable.
As we drew close to the jutting peaks the wind's strange piping again
became manifest, and I could see Danforth's hands trembling at the
controls. Rank amateur though I was, I thought at that moment that I might
be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing between
pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over his
duties he did not protest.
I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared at the
sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the pass.
But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous
nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about
as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled,
cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strown
foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky.
It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass, that his mad
shrieking brought us so close to disaster, by shattering my tight hold on
myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment.
A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing
safely——Yet I am afraid that Danforth will never be the same again.
I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him
scream out so insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly
responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted
conversation above the wind's piping and the engine's buzzing as we
reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the
camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as
we prepared to leave the nightmare city.

All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It
was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of those
echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains of madness which we
crossed; but a single fantastic, demonic glimpse, among the churning
westward zenith clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward
mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared.
He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things
about "the black pit," "the carven rim," "the proto-Shoggoths," "the
windowless solids with five dimensions," "the nameless cylinders," "the
elder pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color out of
space," "the wings," "the eyes in darkness," "the moon-ladder," "the
original, the eternal, the undying," and other bizarre conceptions; but when
he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and
macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among
the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy
of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library.
The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed
enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that its
swirls of ice dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how
vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified
by such layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest—and,
of course, Danforth did not hint any of these specific horrors till after his
memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never
have seen so much in one instantaneous glance.
At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad
word of all too obvious source: "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
THE END

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