# At the Mountains of Madness (B1 edition)

*H. P. Lovecraft*

## I.

I am forced to speak because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. I am very unwilling to give my reasons against this planned invasion of the antarctic. It will be a huge fossil hunt, with wide boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am even less willing because my warning may be useless.

People will surely doubt the real facts as I must tell them. Yet if I left out everything that seems wild and unbelievable, nothing would be left. The photographs, both ordinary and aerial, have never been shown before. They will help me, because they are terribly clear and real. Still, people will doubt them, because clever fakes can be made so well. Of course, people will laugh at the ink drawings and call them obvious tricks. Yet art experts ought to notice their strangeness and their technique, and wonder about them.

In the end I must trust the judgment and good name of a few scientific leaders. On one hand, they must think independently enough to judge my facts fairly. My facts are horribly convincing in themselves, or in the light of certain very old and strange myth cycles. On the other hand, these leaders must have enough influence to stop the world of explorers. They must stop any rash and too ambitious program in the region of those mountains of madness.

Sadly, fairly unknown men like me and my colleagues have little chance of being heard. We are connected only with a small university. And these matters are wildly strange and open to great argument.

It is also against us that we are not, strictly speaking, experts in the fields that became most important. I am a geologist. I led the Miskatonic University Expedition for one purpose only. I wanted to get deep samples of rock and soil from different parts of the antarctic continent. We had help from a remarkable drill made by Professor Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department.

I did not want to be a pioneer in any other field. But I did hope for something from this new machine. We would use it at different points along paths already explored. Then it might bring up materials that ordinary methods of collecting had never reached.

As the public already knows from our reports, Pabodie's drill was new and unusual. It was very light and easy to carry. It also joined the ordinary Artesian drill with the small circular rock drill. In this way it could quickly deal with layers of rock of different hardness.

There was a steel head, jointed rods, a gasoline motor and a wooden derrick that folded up. There was equipment for dynamite, and cords, and an auger for removing rubbish. There were also pipes in sections, for holes five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep. With the other parts we needed, all this was no heavier than three seven-dog sledges could carry. This was possible because of the clever aluminum alloy. Most of the metal objects were made of it.

We had four large Dornier planes. They were built especially for flying at the great heights needed on the antarctic plateau. Pabodie had added devices to warm the fuel and to start the engines quickly. The planes could carry our whole expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier. They could take us to different good places inland. From these places, enough dogs would serve us.

We planned to cover as large an area as one antarctic season allowed. If it was really necessary, we would stay longer. We would work mostly in the mountain ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea. Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott and Byrd had explored these regions, some more and some less. We would often change camp by plane. The distances would be great enough to matter for geology. So we expected to dig up far more material than anyone before us. We wanted especially the pre-Cambrian strata. Very few antarctic specimens of these had been collected before.

We also wanted as many kinds as possible of the upper rocks that contain fossils. The early history of life in this cold land of ice and death is very important. It tells us much about the earth's past. Everybody knows that the antarctic continent was once warm, and even tropical. It was full of plant and animal life. Today only the lichens, sea animals, spiders and penguins of the northern edge survive from that life. We hoped to add to this knowledge with more variety, accuracy and detail. When a simple boring showed signs of fossils, we would make the hole bigger by blasting. In this way we would get specimens of a good size and in good condition.

The depth of our borings would depend on how promising the upper soil or rock looked. We would bore only on land that was bare, or nearly bare, of ice. This meant slopes and ridges, of course. The lower land lay under solid ice a mile or two miles thick.

We could not waste drilling depth on much thick ice. But Pabodie had worked out a plan for it. He would sink copper electrodes in thick groups of borings. A gasoline-driven dynamo would send current through them and melt small areas of ice.

On an expedition like ours, we could only try this plan as an experiment. But the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition plans to follow it. They plan this despite the warnings I have given since we returned from the antarctic.

The public knows about the Miskatonic Expedition from our many wireless reports. We sent them to the *Arkham Advertiser* and to the Associated Press. Later Pabodie and I wrote articles too. Four of us came from the University. There was Pabodie, and Lake of the biology department. There was Atwood of the physics department, who was also a meteorologist. And there was I, the geologist, who was the leader in name. We also had sixteen assistants: seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics.

Of these sixteen, twelve were trained pilots. All but two of the pilots were also good wireless operators. Eight of them could find their way with compass and sextant, as Pabodie, Atwood and I could. Of course, our two ships also had full crews. They were old wooden ships once used to hunt whales, made stronger for the ice, with extra steam engines.

The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation paid for the expedition, with help from a few special gifts. So our preparations were very thorough, although there was little publicity.

The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials and the parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston. The planes were not yet put together. There our ships were loaded.

We were wonderfully well equipped for our special purposes. We learned a great deal from the excellent example of many recent explorers before us. They had been very brilliant. Their example helped us with supplies, daily routine, transport and building camps. There had been so many of these explorers, and they were so famous. That is why the world hardly noticed our own expedition, though it was quite large.

As the newspapers reported, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd, 1930. We went slowly down the coast and through the Panama Canal. We stopped at Samoa and at Hobart, Tasmania. At Hobart we took on our last supplies.

None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before. So we all trusted our ship captains a great deal. J. B. Douglas commanded the brig *Arkham* and was commander of the whole sea party. Georg Thorfinnssen commanded the barque *Miskatonic*. Both were experienced whalers in antarctic waters.

We left the inhabited world behind us. The sun sank lower and lower in the north, and stayed longer above the horizon each day. At about 62° South Latitude we saw our first icebergs. They were flat on top like tables, with straight vertical sides. We crossed the antarctic circle on October 20th, with the funny old ceremonies that are usual. Just before that, field ice gave us a lot of trouble.

The falling temperature troubled me a good deal after our long voyage through hot seas. But I tried to prepare myself for the harder cold to come. Many times the strange effects in the air delighted me. Once I saw a very clear mirage, the first I had ever seen. In it, distant icebergs became the walls of impossible castles in the sky.

Luckily the ice was not wide or thickly packed, and we pushed through it. We reached open water again at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175°. On the morning of October 26th a strong "land blink" appeared in the south. Before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement. A huge, high, snowy mountain chain opened out before us and filled the whole view ahead. At last we had met the first outer edge of the great unknown continent. It was a secret world of frozen death.

These peaks were clearly the Admiralty Range, which Ross had discovered. Now our task was to sail around Cape Adare. Then we would go down the east coast of Victoria Land to McMurdo Sound. Our planned base was on its shore, at the foot of the volcano Erebus, in South Latitude 77° 9´.

The last part of the voyage was vivid and stirred my imagination. Great bare, mysterious peaks rose up all the time in the west. At noon the low northern sun poured its misty red light over everything. So did the southern midnight sun, which was even lower and almost touched the horizon. The light fell on white snow, blue ice and lanes of water. It fell on black bits of bare granite slope too.

The terrible antarctic wind rushed through the lonely summits in wild gusts, now and then. Sometimes its sound was like a wild musical piping, almost alive. Its notes covered a wide range. For some reason hidden deep in my memory, this sound disturbed me. It even seemed faintly terrible.

Something about the scene reminded me of the strange, disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. It also reminded me of the evil plateau of Leng. The feared *Necronomicon* of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred describes it in even stranger, more disturbing words. Later I was rather sorry that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.

On November 7th we passed Franklin Island. For a while we could not see the western range. The next day we saw the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead. Beyond them was the long line of the Parry Mountains. To the east stretched the low, white line of the great ice barrier. It rose straight up to a height of two hundred feet, like the rocky cliffs of Quebec. Here ships could sail no farther south.

In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound. We stayed off the coast, sheltered by smoking Mt. Erebus. Its rough peak of old lava rose about twelve thousand seven hundred feet against the eastern sky. It looked like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama. Beyond it rose the white, ghostlike height of Mt. Terror. It was ten thousand nine hundred feet high, and it was no longer an active volcano.

Puffs of smoke came from Erebus now and then. One of the graduate assistants was a brilliant young fellow named Danforth. He pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope. He said that this mountain was discovered in 1840. Seven years later Poe wrote a poem. Danforth was sure that Erebus had given Poe this picture:

"—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 read many strange and unusual books, and he had talked a good deal about Poe. I was interested myself because Poe's only long story is set in the antarctic. It is the disturbing and mysterious *Arthur Gordon Pym*. Countless odd-looking penguins squawked and flapped their fins on the bare shore. They did the same on the high ice barrier behind it. Many fat seals could be seen in the water. Some swam, and some lay spread out on large pieces of slowly drifting ice.

We used small boats and made a difficult landing on Ross Island. It was shortly after midnight, on the morning of the 9th. We carried a line of cable from each of the ships. We prepared to unload supplies with a breeches-buoy.

Our feelings were strong and mixed when we first walked on antarctic soil. We felt this, even though the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had been at this very place before us.

Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano was only a temporary one. We kept our headquarters on board the *Arkham*. We landed all our drilling machines, dogs, sledges and tents. We landed food, gasoline tanks and the experimental ice-melting equipment. We landed cameras, both ordinary and aerial, plane parts and other equipment. There were also three small portable wireless sets, besides those in the planes. They could reach the *Arkham's* large set from any part of the continent we were likely to visit.

The ship's set could talk with the outside world. It was to send press reports to the *Arkham Advertiser's* powerful wireless station on Kingsport Head, Mass. We hoped to finish our work during a single antarctic summer. If this was not possible, we would spend the winter on the *Arkham*. We would send the *Miskatonic* north before the ice froze, to bring supplies for another summer.

I need not repeat what the newspapers have already printed about our early work. We climbed Mt. Erebus. We made successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island. Pabodie's machine did them with surprising speed, even through solid rock. We tested the small ice-melting equipment. We made a dangerous climb up the great barrier with sledges and supplies. Finally we put together five huge planes at the camp on top of the barrier.

The land party was twenty men and fifty-five Alaskan sledge dogs. Their health was remarkable. But of course we had not yet met any really dangerous cold or storms.

Most of the time the thermometer showed between zero and 20° or 25° above. We knew New England winters, so we were used to cold like this. The barrier camp was half permanent. It was to become a storage cache for gasoline, food, dynamite and other supplies.

We needed only four of our planes to carry the exploring material. The fifth plane stayed at the storage cache with a pilot and two men from the ships. It would be a way for people from the *Arkham* to reach us if we lost all our exploring planes.

Later we would not need all the other planes for moving equipment. Then we would use one or two for a shuttle service. They would fly between this cache and another permanent base on the great plateau. That base would be six hundred to seven hundred miles to the south, beyond Beardmore Glacier.

Almost everyone told of terrible winds and storms that pour down from the plateau. Still, we decided not to build bases in between. We took our chances, to save effort and probably to work better.

Wireless reports have told of our squadron's breathtaking flight on November 21st. We flew four hours without stopping over the high shelf ice. Huge peaks rose in the west. The deep silence echoed with the sound of our engines.

The wind troubled us only a little. Our radio compasses helped us through the one thick fog we met. Between Latitudes 83° and 84° a huge rise of land appeared ahead. We knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world. The frozen sea was now giving way to a dark, mountainous coast.

At last we were truly entering the white world of the far south, dead for ages. Just as we realized it, we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen far away in the east. It rose to a height of almost fifteen thousand feet.

We set up the southern base above the glacier, in Latitude 86° 7´, East Longitude 174° 23´. Our sledge trips and short flights reached many points. There we made very fast and effective borings and blastings. All this is now history. So is the hard and successful climb of Mt. Nansen, from December 13th to 15th. Pabodie made it with two of the graduate students, Gedney and Carroll.

We were about eight thousand five hundred feet above sea-level. At certain points, test drillings found solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow and ice. So we used the small melting machine a great deal. We sank bores and used dynamite at many places. No explorer before us had ever thought of collecting mineral specimens there.

The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones we got in this way confirmed what we believed. This plateau was made of the same rock as the great main part of the continent to the west. But it was a little different from the parts lying east, below South America. At that time we thought those eastern parts formed a separate, smaller continent. We believed that a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas divided it from the larger one. Byrd has since proved this wrong.

In some of the sandstones we found very interesting fossil marks and pieces. Boring showed what these rocks were, and then we dynamited and chiseled them. There were ferns, seaweeds, trilobites and crinoids. There were mollusks such as linguellae and gastropods. All of these seemed really important for the region's earliest history. There was also a strange striated mark shaped like a triangle, about a foot across at its widest. Lake put it together from three pieces of slate. They came up from a deep hole we had blasted.

These pieces came from a point to the west, near the Queen Alexandra Range. Lake was a biologist. He seemed to find the strange mark unusually hard to explain, and exciting. To my geologist's eye, it looked rather like ripple marks. These are fairly common in sedimentary rocks.

Slate is only a metamorphic rock. It forms when a sedimentary layer is pressed hard. The pressure itself bends and changes any marks in the rock in odd ways. So I saw no reason to wonder very much about the striated hollow.

On January 6, 1931, we flew directly over the south pole in two of the great planes. Lake, Pabodie, Daniels, all six of the students, four mechanics and I were on board. A sudden high wind forced us down once, but luckily it did not grow into a real storm. As the papers have said, this was one of several observation flights. On the others we tried to find new features of the land, in areas no explorer had reached.

Our early flights disappointed us in this. But they gave us some wonderful examples of polar mirages. These mirages are rich, fantastic and deceptive. Our sea voyage had already given us a short taste of them.

Distant mountains floated in the sky like magic cities. Under the magic of the low midnight sun, the whole white world often melted away. It became a gold, silver and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and hopes of adventure.

On cloudy days flying was quite difficult. The snowy earth and the sky tended to melt together into one mysterious, opalescent emptiness. There was no horizon to show where one ended and the other began.

At last we decided to carry out our first plan. We would fly five hundred miles east with all four exploring planes. There we would set up a new sub-base. We thought it would probably be on the smaller part of the continent, as we wrongly believed. Rock specimens from there would be useful for comparison.

So far our health had stayed excellent. Lime juice balanced our steady diet of tinned and salted food. The temperature was mostly above zero, so we did not need our thickest furs.

It was now midsummer. If we hurried carefully, we might finish our work by March. Then we could avoid a long, dull winter through the endless antarctic night. Several wild windstorms had hit us from the west. But Atwood had saved us from damage with his skill. He had made simple shelters for the planes and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks. He had also made the main camp buildings stronger with snow. Our good luck and skill had really been almost uncanny.

Of course, the outside world knew our program. It also heard about Lake's strange and stubborn wish to make a trip west, or rather northwest. He insisted on searching there before our big move to the new base.

It seems that he had thought a great deal about that striated triangle mark in the slate. His ideas about it were boldly and alarmingly new. He saw in it certain contradictions of nature and of geological time. These made him extremely curious. He badly wanted to make more borings and blastings in the west. The pieces had clearly come from a rock layer stretching that way.

He was strangely sure that the mark was the print of some large, unknown creature. Science could not classify it, and it was quite highly evolved. Yet the rock with the mark was very, very old. It was Cambrian, if not actually pre-Cambrian. At that time highly evolved life could hardly exist. In fact, no life above single cells could exist, or at most trilobites. These pieces, with their strange mark, must have been five hundred million to a thousand million years old.

### Glossary

- **derrick**: the tall frame that stands over a drill hole.
- **auger**: a tool that removes loose material from a hole.
- **sledge**: a sled pulled by dogs over snow and ice.
- **pre-Cambrian**: a period of the earth's history before about 540 million years ago; Cambrian is the period just after it.
- **striated**: marked with thin lines.
- **trilobite**: an early sea animal with a shell, which no longer exists.
- **mirage**: an image in the air caused by light bending in cold or hot air; far things seem to float or change shape.
- **land blink**: a light in the sky that shows there is land below the horizon.
- **breeches-buoy**: a rope seat on a cable, used to carry people or loads between a ship and the shore.
- **cache**: a store of supplies left in a place.
- **Necronomicon**: a feared and monstrous book, written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
- **Leng**: an evil high plateau known from old myths and from the *Necronomicon*.
- **Yaanek**: a volcano near the pole in Poe's poem; "boreal" means northern, and "ultimate climes" means the farthest lands.

## II.

I think the public's imagination was strongly excited by our wireless bulletins about Lake's start northwestward. He was going into regions where no human foot had walked, and no human imagination had reached. But we did not mention his wild hopes. He hoped to change the whole sciences of biology and geology completely.

From January 11th to 18th he had made a first sledge and boring trip with Pabodie and five others. On this trip they lost two dogs. A sledge turned over when they crossed one of the great pressure ridges in the ice. The trip had brought up more and more of the Archaean slate. Even I was interested in the great number of clear fossil marks in that unbelievably old rock layer.

But these marks came from very primitive life forms. They were not a great puzzle in themselves. The only puzzle was that any life at all appeared in rock so clearly pre-Cambrian. So I still could not see the sense of Lake's demand. He wanted a break in our time-saving program. This break needed all four planes, many men and all the expedition's machines.

In the end I did not forbid the plan. But I decided not to go with the northwestward party, though Lake begged me for my advice as a geologist. While they were away, I would stay at the base with Pabodie and five men. We would work out the final plans for the move east. To prepare for it, one of the planes had begun to bring a good supply of gasoline from McMurdo Sound. But this could wait for a while. I kept one sledge and nine dogs with me. It is unwise ever to be without some way of travel in a world so empty, dead for ages.

As everyone will remember, Lake's group sent out its own reports from the short-wave sets on the planes. Our set at the southern base picked them up. At the same time the *Arkham* at McMurdo Sound picked them up too. From there they were passed on to the outside world on wave lengths up to fifty meters.

They started on January 22nd at 4 a.m. We received the first wireless message only two hours later. Lake said they had landed at a point about three hundred miles from us. They were starting a small ice-melting and boring there. Six hours after that, a second, very excited message came. They had worked as fast and as hard as beavers. They had sunk a shallow shaft and blasted it. At the end they found slate pieces with several marks. The marks were roughly like the one that had first puzzled us.

Three hours later a short bulletin said that they were flying again. They were flying into a raw and bitter gale. I sent a message of protest against more risks. Lake answered shortly that his new specimens made any risk worth taking.

I saw that his excitement had reached the point of rebellion. I could do nothing to stop this wild risk to the success of the whole expedition. But it was terrible to think of him going deeper and deeper into that white emptiness. It was dangerous and evil, full of storms and deep mysteries. It stretched for about fifteen hundred miles to the coast of Queen Mary and Knox Lands. That coast was only half known and half guessed.

Then, about an hour and a half later, a doubly excited message came from Lake's plane in the air. It almost changed my feelings completely. It made me wish I had gone with the party:

"10:05 p.m. On the wing. After snowstorm, have seen mountain range ahead higher than any seen before. May equal Himalayas, counting height of plateau. Probable Latitude 76° 15´, Longitude 113° 10´ E. Reaches as far as can see to right and left. Think there are two smoking cones. All peaks black and bare of snow. Gale blowing off them makes flying hard."

After that, Pabodie, the men and I bent over the receiver, hardly breathing. We thought of this giant wall of mountains seven hundred miles away. The thought set our deepest sense of adventure on fire. We were very happy that our expedition had discovered it, even if we ourselves had not. 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 move essentials to other three for return or further moves if needed. But no more heavy plane travel needed just now. Mountains beyond 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 rocks look stratified. Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in. Strange skyline effects—regular sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks. Whole thing wonderful in red-gold light of low sun. Like land of mystery in a dream, or gateway to forbidden world of wonders no one has seen. Wish you were here to study."

It was really time for sleep. But not one of us listeners thought of going to bed for a moment. It must have been much the same at McMurdo Sound. The supply cache and the *Arkham* were getting the messages there too. Captain Douglas sent out a call congratulating everybody on the important find. Sherman, the cache operator, agreed with him. Of course we were sorry about the damaged plane. But we hoped it could be easily mended. Then, at eleven p.m., another call came from Lake:

"Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don't dare try really tall peaks in present weather, but shall later. Terrible work climbing, and hard going at this height, but worth it. Great range fairly solid, so can't see anything beyond. Main summits higher than Himalayas, and very strange. Range looks like pre-Cambrian slate, with clear signs of many other pushed-up strata. Was wrong about volcanoes. 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. Rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, like old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich's paintings. Impressive from a distance. Flew close to some. Carroll thought they were made of smaller separate pieces, but that is probably weathering. Most edges crumbled and rounded, as if open to storms and climate changes for millions of years.

"Parts, especially upper parts, seem lighter-colored rock than any strata visible on slopes themselves. So clearly crystalline origin. Close flying shows many cave mouths, some unusually regular in shape, square or semicircular. You must come and investigate. Think I saw rampart right on top of one peak. Height seems about thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand feet. Am up twenty-one thousand five hundred myself, in terrible, biting cold. Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of caves, but no flying danger so far."

For another half hour Lake kept up a fast stream of comments. He said he meant to climb some of the peaks on foot. I answered that I would join him as soon as he could send a plane. Pabodie and I would work out the best plan for gasoline. We had to decide where and how to collect our supply, now that the expedition had changed.

Clearly, Lake's borings and his flying would need a great deal of fuel. It would have to go to his new base at the foot of the mountains. And perhaps we would not make the flight east this season after all. About this business I called Captain Douglas. I asked him to get as much as possible out of the ships. He should bring it up the barrier with the one dog team we had left there. What we really needed was a direct route across the unknown region between Lake and McMurdo Sound.

Lake called me later. He had decided to keep the camp where Moulton's plane had come down. Repairs had already made some progress there. The ice sheet was very thin, and dark ground showed here and there. He would sink some borings and blasts at that very point. He would do this before any sledge trips or climbing expeditions.

He spoke of the great majesty of the whole scene, too great for words. He spoke of his strange feelings in the shelter of those huge, silent peaks. Their ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at the edge of the world.

Atwood had measured with his theodolite. The five tallest peaks were from thirty thousand to thirty-four thousand feet high.

The windswept ground clearly worried Lake. It showed that huge gales must come sometimes, more violent than anything we had met so far. His camp lay a little more than five miles from where the higher foothills rose steeply.

His words came across seven hundred miles of icy emptiness. In them I could almost hear a note of hidden alarm. He urged us all to hurry and to finish with the strange new region as soon as possible. Now he was going to rest. He had worked all day without a break, with almost unequalled speed, effort and results.

In the morning I had a three-way wireless talk with Lake and Captain Douglas. Their bases were very far apart. We agreed that one of Lake's planes would come to my base. It would fetch Pabodie, the five men and me, and all the fuel it could carry. The rest of the fuel question could wait a few days. It depended on our decision about the trip east. For now, Lake had enough for heating the camp and for borings.

In the end the old southern base should be restocked. But if we put off the trip east, we would not use it till the next summer. 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 a long time, as things might turn out. If we spent the winter in the antarctic, we would probably fly straight from Lake's base to the *Arkham*. We would not come back to this spot. Some of our cone-shaped tents had already been made stronger with blocks of hard snow. Now we decided to finish the job and make a permanent village. Lake had plenty of tents with him. He had all that his base would need, even after we arrived. I sent a wireless message about our plans. Pabodie and I would be ready for the move northwest after one day's work and one night's rest.

After four p.m., however, our work was not very steady. At about that time Lake began to send the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day had started badly. A survey from the air looked at the nearly bare rock surfaces. It showed none of the Archaean and very old strata he was looking for. These rocks formed a great part of the giant peaks. The peaks rose up at a frustrating distance from the camp.

Most of the rocks they saw seemed to be Jurassic and Comanchean sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists. Now and then there was a shiny black outcrop. It looked like a hard coal, almost like slate.

This rather discouraged Lake. All his plans depended on digging up specimens more than five hundred million years older. He saw that he would need a long sledge trip to find the Archaean slate vein again. This was the vein where he had found the strange marks. He would have to travel from these foothills to the steep slopes of the giant mountains themselves.

All the same, he decided to do some local boring as part of the expedition's general program. So he set up the drill and put five men to work with it. The others finished setting up the camp and repairing the damaged plane. They chose the softest rock they could see for the first sample. It was a sandstone about a quarter of a mile from the camp. The drill made excellent progress without much extra blasting.

About three hours later, just after the first really heavy blast of the work, the drill crew was heard shouting. Young Gedney, the acting foreman, rushed into the camp with startling news.

They had struck a cave. Early in the boring, the sandstone had changed into a vein of Comanchean limestone. It was full of tiny fossil cephalopods, corals, sea urchins and spirifera. There were also signs of sponges and of the bones of sea animals with backbones. These were probably teliosts, sharks and ganoids.

This alone was important enough. They were the first vertebrate fossils the expedition had found. But shortly afterwards the drill head dropped through the rock layer into what seemed empty space. Then a completely new and twice as strong wave of excitement spread among the diggers.

A good-sized blast had opened the underground secret. There was now a jagged hole, about five feet across and three feet thick. Through it, the eager searchers saw a shallow hollow in the limestone. Trickling ground water had worn it more than fifty million years ago, in a lost tropical world.

The hollow layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep. But it stretched on endlessly in all directions. Its air was fresh and moved a little. This suggested that it was part of a large underground system. Its roof and floor had many large stalactites and stalagmites. Some of them met and formed columns.

But most important of all was a huge deposit of shells and bones. In places it nearly blocked the passage. It had been washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns and fungi. It came from forests of Tertiary cycads, fan palms and early flowering plants too. This mixture of bones held more Cretaceous, Eocene and other animal species than anyone could count. Even the greatest palaeontologist could not have counted or classified them in a year. There were mollusks, crab-like shells, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and early mammals. They were great and small, known and unknown.

No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp shouting. And no wonder everyone else dropped their work. They rushed through the biting cold to the tall derrick. It marked a newly found gateway to the secrets of the inner earth and of vanished ages.

When Lake had satisfied his first sharp curiosity, he scribbled a message in his notebook. He had young Moulton run back to the camp to send it by wireless.

This was my first news of the discovery. Lake had identified early shells, and bones of ganoids and placoderms. There were remains of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, and great pieces of mosasaur skulls. There were dinosaur backbones and armor plates, and pterodactyl teeth and wing bones. There were remains of Archaeopteryx, Miocene sharks' teeth and primitive bird skulls. There were other bones of ancient mammals, such as Palaeotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons and Titanotheriidae.

There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, an elephant, a true camel, a deer or a cow-like animal. So Lake decided that the last deposits had come during the Oligocene Age. The hollow layer had lain in its present dry, dead and closed state for at least thirty million years.

On the other hand, it was extremely strange that so many very early life forms were there. The limestone itself was certainly Comanchean, and not a bit earlier. Typical fossils in it, such as ventriculites, proved this. But the loose pieces in the hollow space were different. A surprising number came from creatures that people thought belonged only to much older periods. There were even simple fishes, mollusks and corals as old as the Silurian or Ordovician.

So there was only one conclusion. In this part of the world, life had continued in a remarkable and unique way. It joined the life of over three hundred million years ago with that of only thirty million years ago. The cavern was closed in the Oligocene Age. How long this continuity went on after that was, of course, impossible to guess.

In any case, the terrible ice came in the Pleistocene, about five hundred thousand years ago. Compared with the age of this hollow, that was only yesterday. It must have ended any of the early life forms that had survived here longer than elsewhere.

Lake was not content with his first message. He had another bulletin written and sent across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get back. After that, Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes. Lake sent him frequent extra messages by one messenger after another. Moulton sent them on to me, and to the *Arkham* to pass on to the outside world.

Newspaper readers will remember how these reports of that afternoon excited men of science. After all these years, those reports have finally led to the Starkweather-Moore Expedition. I am very anxious to stop it from carrying out its plans. I had better give the messages exactly as Lake sent them. Our base operator McTighe wrote them out from his pencil shorthand:

Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone pieces from blasts. Several clear triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate. Proves that source survived from over six hundred million years ago to Comanchean times. Only moderate changes in shape, and decrease in average size. Comanchean prints seem 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 earlier work and adds to conclusions.

Seems to show, as I suspected, that earth has seen whole cycle or cycles of life before known one. Known one begins with Archaeozoic cells. This thing was evolved and specialized not later than a thousand million years ago. Planet was young then, and lately unfit for any life forms of normal structure. Question arises when, where, and how development took place.

Later. Examining some skeleton pieces of large land and sea reptiles and primitive mammals. Find strange local wounds or injuries to bones. No known hunting or meat-eating animal of any period could cause them. Of two kinds—straight, deep boring holes, and what look like hacking cuts. One or two bones cut through cleanly. Not many specimens affected. Am sending to camp for electric torches. Will extend search underground by cutting away stalactites.

Still later. Have found strange soapstone piece about six inches across and an inch and a half thick. Quite unlike any local rock we can see. Greenish, but no evidence to place its period. Strangely smooth and regular. Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off. Signs of other breaks at inner angles and in center of surface. Small, smooth hollow in center of surface that is not broken. Makes us very curious about where it came from and how it was worn. Probably some trick of water action. Carroll, with magnifying glass, thinks he can see more marks of geological importance. Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns. Dogs growing nervous as we work, and seem to hate this soapstone. Must see if it has any strange smell. 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 huge barrel-shaped fossil. Nature completely unknown. Probably plant, unless unusually large specimen of unknown sea radiata. Tissue clearly preserved by mineral salts. Tough as leather, but still amazingly flexible in places. Marks of broken-off parts at ends and around sides. Six feet end to end. 3.5 feet across in middle, narrowing to one foot at each end. Like a barrel with five raised ridges instead of wooden staves. Side breaks, as of thin stalks, at middle line of these ridges. In furrows between ridges are strange growths—combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans. All badly damaged but one, which has wing spread of almost seven feet. Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of ancient myth. Especially the legendary Elder Things in *Necronomicon*.

These wings seem to be made of thin skin, stretched on frame of glandular tubes. Tiny holes seem to be in frame tubes at wing tips. Ends of body dried up and wrinkled. No clue to inside, or to what was broken off there. Must dissect when we get back to camp. Can't decide whether plant or animal. Many features clearly almost too primitive to believe. Have set all hands cutting stalactites and looking for more specimens. More scarred bones found, but these must wait. Having trouble with dogs. They can't stand the new specimen. Would probably tear it to pieces if we didn't keep it away from them.

11:30 p.m. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas. Matter of highest—I might say transcendent—importance. *Arkham* must relay to Kingsport Head Station at once. Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing that left prints in rocks. Mills, Boudreau and Fowler discover group of thirteen more at underground point forty feet from hole. Mixed with soapstone pieces, strangely rounded and shaped, smaller than one found before. Star-shaped, but no marks of breaking except at some of the points.

Of organic specimens, eight seem perfect, with all appendages. Have brought all to surface, leading dogs away. 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 in all. Six-foot, five-ridged barrel body, 3.5 feet across in middle, one foot across at ends. Dark gray, flexible, and endlessly tough. Seven-foot wings of thin skin, same color. Found folded; they spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing frame made of tubes, or glandular, of lighter gray, with holes at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around middle are five sets of light-gray flexible arms or tentacles. One set sits at the center top of each of the five upright, stave-like ridges. Found tightly folded to body, but can stretch to over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks three inches thick. Each branches after six inches into five smaller stalks. Each of these branches after eight inches into five small, narrowing tentacles. So each stalk has twenty-five tentacles in all.

At top of body, blunt, bulb-like neck of lighter gray, with signs of something like gills. It holds what seems to be yellowish five-pointed head shaped like a starfish. Head covered with three-inch stiff cilia of many rainbow colors.

Head thick and puffy, about two feet from point to point. Three-inch flexible yellowish tubes stick out from each point. Slit in exact center of top, probably for breathing. At end of each tube is a ball. When handled, yellowish skin on ball rolls back. Shows glassy globe with red iris—clearly an eye.

Five slightly longer red tubes start from inner angles of starfish head. They end in bag-like swellings of same color. When pressed, these open into bell-shaped openings, two inches across at most. Openings lined with sharp, white, tooth-like points—probably mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish head found folded tightly down. Tubes and points cling to bulb-like neck and body. Surprisingly flexible despite great toughness.

At bottom of body are rough counterparts of head parts, but they work differently. Bulb-like light-gray pseudoneck, without signs of gills, holds greenish five-pointed starfish shape.

Tough, muscular arms four feet long. They narrow from seven inches thick at base to about 2.5 at point. To each point is attached small end of greenish five-veined triangle of thin skin. Triangle eight inches long and six wide at far end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudofoot that made prints in rocks. These rocks are from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old.

From inner angles of starfish shape stick out two-foot red tubes. They narrow from three inches thick at base to one at tip. Openings at tips. All these parts endlessly tough and leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot arms with paddles surely used for moving about somehow, in sea or otherwise. When moved, they suggest very strong muscles. As found, all these parts tightly folded over pseudoneck and end of body, like parts at other end.

Cannot yet say for sure whether animal or plant, but animal now more likely. Probably very highly evolved radiata that kept certain primitive features. Clearly like echinoderm, despite some evidence against it here.

Wings hard to explain, since creature probably lived in sea. But they may help in moving through water. Symmetry strangely like a plant's. Plant is built up-and-down; animal is built front-to-back. This thing is built like a plant. Evolved amazingly early, before even simplest Archaean single cells known so far. Impossible to guess its origin.

Complete specimens look uncannily like certain creatures of ancient myth. So one cannot help thinking they existed outside antarctic in ancient times. Dyer and Pabodie have read *Necronomicon*. They have seen Clark Ashton Smith's nightmare paintings based on the book. They will understand when I speak of Elder Things. These were supposed to have created all earth life as joke or mistake. Students have always thought this idea came from sick imaginations working on very ancient tropical radiata. Also like prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of—Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.

Huge field of study opened. Deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early Eocene period, judging from specimens found with them. Big stalagmites formed above them. Hard work cutting them out, but toughness prevented damage. State of preservation miraculous, clearly because of limestone. No more found so far, but will search again later. Job now to get fourteen huge specimens to camp without dogs. Dogs bark wildly and can't be trusted near them.

With nine men—three left to guard dogs—we ought to manage three sledges fairly well, though wind is bad. Must set up plane connection 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 isn't the high point of the expedition, I don't know what is. We're made scientifically. Congratulations, Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the cave. Now will *Arkham* please repeat description?

Pabodie and I felt almost more than words can describe when this report came. Our companions were hardly less excited than we were. McTighe had quickly translated a few main points as they came from the humming receiver. As soon as Lake's operator signed off, he wrote out the whole message from his shorthand.

Everyone understood that this discovery would begin a new age in science. The *Arkham's* operator repeated back the descriptive parts, as Lake had asked. Then I at once sent Lake my congratulations. Sherman did the same from his station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache. So did Captain Douglas of the *Arkham*.

Later, as head of the expedition, I added some remarks. They were to be passed on through the *Arkham* to the outside world. Of course, it was foolish to think of rest in all this excitement. My only wish was to get to Lake's camp as quickly as I could. So I was disappointed when he sent word about a rising mountain gale. It made flying impossible for some time.

But within an hour and a half our interest rose again, and the disappointment went away. Lake sent more messages. All fourteen great specimens had been carried to the camp successfully. It had been hard work, for the things were surprisingly heavy. But nine men had managed it very well. Now some of the party were quickly building a snow corral at a safe distance from the camp. The dogs could be brought there, so feeding them would be easier. The specimens were laid out on the hard snow near the camp. Only one was not there. On that one Lake was making rough attempts at dissection.

This dissection was harder than expected. A gasoline stove heated the newly raised laboratory tent. Still, the chosen specimen stayed tougher than leather. It was a powerful, complete one, and its tissues only seemed flexible. Lake did not know how to make the necessary cuts. Any violent cutting would destroy the fine details of structure he was looking for.

He did have seven more perfect specimens, it is true. But these were too few to use up carelessly, unless the cave later gave an endless supply. So he took this specimen out and dragged in another one. It still had remains of the starfish parts at both ends. But it was badly crushed, and partly split along one of the great furrows of the body.

He quickly reported the results over the wireless. They were strange and exciting indeed. His instruments could hardly cut the strange tissue, so no careful or exact work was possible. But the little he achieved left us all amazed and confused.

Biology as we know it would have to be completely rewritten. This thing did not grow from any kind of cells known to science. There had been almost no mineral replacement. The thing was perhaps forty million years old, yet the inner organs were completely whole.

It was leathery, it did not decay, and it could hardly be destroyed. These qualities belonged to its very nature. They came from some Paleocene cycle of evolution of creatures without backbones. This was completely beyond our powers of guessing.

At first everything Lake found was dry. But the heated tent began to thaw the thing. Then, toward its uninjured side, he found moisture with a sharp, bad smell. It was not blood. It was a thick, dark-green fluid, which seemed to do the same job. By the time Lake reached this stage, all thirty-seven dogs had been brought to the corral near the camp. It was not finished yet. Even at that distance the dogs barked savagely and grew restless at the sharp, spreading smell.

This first dissection did not help to explain the strange creature. It only made the mystery deeper. All the guesses about its outer parts had been correct. On this evidence one would hardly hesitate to call the thing an animal. But inside, Lake found so many signs of a plant that he was completely lost. It had digestion and circulation. It removed waste matter through the red tubes of its starfish-shaped base.

At a quick look, one would say that its breathing organs used oxygen rather than carbon dioxide. There were strange signs of chambers for storing air. It could also move its breathing from the outer opening to at least two other complete breathing systems. These were gills and pores.

Clearly it was amphibian, and it was probably also able to hibernate for long periods without air. There seemed to be vocal organs, connected with the main breathing system. But they were too strange to explain at once. Speech in syllables seemed hardly possible. But musical piping notes covering a wide range were very likely. The muscles were developed almost beyond nature.

The nervous system was so complex and so highly developed that Lake was shocked. In some ways the thing was very primitive and ancient. Yet it had a set of ganglia and connections that showed extremely specialized development.

Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced. There were signs of sense organs, partly working through the stiff cilia of the head. They involved factors unknown in any other creature on earth. Probably it had more than five senses. So nothing we know could tell us how it lived.

Lake thought it must have been a very sensitive creature in its ancient world. It must have had finely divided tasks, much like the ants and bees of today. It reproduced like the plants called cryptogams, especially the pteridophyta. It had spore cases at the tips of its wings. It clearly developed from a thallus or prothallus.

But to give it a name now would be pure foolishness. It looked like a radiate, but it was clearly something more. It was partly a plant, but it had three fourths of the main features of an animal. Its symmetrical shape and certain other features clearly showed that it came from the sea. Yet one could not say exactly how far it had adapted later.

After all, the wings kept suggesting the air. How could it have gone through such complex evolution so fast? It had done so on a newborn earth, in time to leave prints in Archaean rocks. This was so far beyond understanding that Lake jokingly recalled the ancient myths. They told of Great Old Ones who came down from the stars. These beings made earth life as a joke or a mistake. He also recalled the wild tales of cosmic hill things from outside. A folklorist colleague in Miskatonic's English department told these tales.

Naturally, he thought about another possibility. The pre-Cambrian prints might have been made by a less evolved ancestor of these specimens. But he quickly rejected this too-easy theory. The older fossils had advanced features of structure. If anything, the later shapes showed decline rather than higher evolution.

The pseudofeet had become smaller. The whole shape seemed coarser and simpler. Also, the nerves and organs he had just examined suggested something strange. They seemed to have gone back from forms that were even more complex. There were surprisingly many atrophied and vestigial parts. Altogether, very little had been solved. So Lake used mythology for a temporary name. He jokingly called his finds "The Elder Ones."

At about two-thirty a.m. he decided to stop work for a while and get a little rest. He covered the dissected creature with a tarpaulin. He came out of the laboratory tent and looked at the complete specimens with fresh interest.

The antarctic sun never set, and it had begun to soften their tissues a little. So the head points and tubes of two or three showed signs of unfolding. But the air was almost below zero. So Lake did not think there was any danger of quick decay. Still, he moved all the undissected specimens closer together. He threw a spare tent over them to keep off the direct sunlight. That would also help to keep their possible smell away from the dogs. The dogs' hostile unrest was really becoming a problem. They were quite far away, behind snow walls that grew higher and higher. More and more of the men were hurrying to build these walls around them.

He had to weigh down the corners of the tent cloth with heavy blocks of snow. This held it in place in the rising gale. The giant mountains seemed about to send down some very strong blasts of wind. The old fears about sudden antarctic winds came back. Under Atwood's supervision, the men took precautions. They banked the tents, the new dog corral and the rough plane shelters with snow. They did this on the side facing the mountains. The plane shelters had been started with hard snow blocks in spare moments. They were not nearly as high as they should be. In the end Lake took all the men off other tasks to work on them.

It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off. He advised us all to rest when his group did, as soon as the shelter walls were a little higher. He had a friendly chat with Pabodie over the radio. He praised again the really wonderful drills that had helped him make his discovery. Atwood also sent greetings and praise.

I gave Lake a warm word of congratulation. I admitted that he had been right about the western trip. We all agreed to talk by wireless at ten in the morning. If the gale was over by then, Lake would send a plane for the party at my base. Just before going to bed, I sent a last message to the *Arkham*. I told them to tone down the day's news for the outside world. The full details seemed so extreme that people would not believe them until there was more proof.

### Glossary

- **pressure ridge**: a raised line where ice pushes together.
- **Archaean**: the earliest age of the earth's history; in this story, rocks five hundred million to a thousand million years old.
- **On the wing**: flying; still in the air.
- **Everest out of the running**: Mount Everest is no longer the highest mountain in the world.
- **theodolite**: an instrument for measuring heights and angles.
- **rampart**: a thick defensive wall.
- **stalactites and stalagmites**: stone "icicles" hanging from a cave roof, and rising from the cave floor.
- **vertebrate**: an animal with a backbone.
- **mosasaur, pterodactyl, Archaeopteryx, labyrinthodonts, Eohippi**: names of extinct ancient animals: sea reptiles, flying reptiles, the first bird, early amphibians and early mammals.
- **Oligocene**: a part of the Tertiary period, after the dinosaurs and before the ice ages; here about thirty million years ago.
- **decadent**: in decline; later and of lower quality.
- **soapstone**: a soft greenish stone, smooth like soap.
- **transcendent**: going far beyond everything else.
- **stave**: one of the long, curved pieces of wood that form the sides of a barrel.
- **furrow**: a long, narrow hollow line, like one made in a field by a plough.
- **corral**: a place with a fence or walls where animals are kept.
- **radiata / radiate**: animals built in a circle around a center, like starfish.
- **crinoid**: a sea animal like a flower on a stalk ("sea lily"), with branching arms.
- **echinoderm**: sea animals like starfish and sea urchins.
- **cilia**: tiny hairs.
- **pseudofoot / pseudoneck**: something that works like a foot or a neck but is not a real one.
- **Elder Things / Great Old Ones**: in old myths, beings from the stars said to have made life on earth.
- **dissect / dissection**: to cut open a body to study it; the cutting open of a body.
- **hibernate**: to sleep for a long time through a cold period.
- **cryptogams, pteridophyta, spore, thallus, prothallus**: they reproduce like ferns, from tiny spores.
- **atrophied and vestigial**: grown smaller and weaker because not used; left over and no longer useful.
- **Dyer better kick himself**: Dyer should be angry with himself for his mistake.
- **We're made scientifically**: our success in science is now certain.

## III.

None of us slept very deeply or for very long that morning, I think. The excitement of Lake's discovery kept us awake, and so did the growing fury of the wind. The wind was so strong even where we were that we wondered how much worse it was at Lake's camp. His camp lay right under the huge unknown peaks that made the wind and sent it down.

McTighe was awake at ten o'clock. As we had agreed, he tried to reach Lake on the wireless. But something electrical in the stormy air to the west seemed to stop all contact. We did reach the *Arkham*, however. Douglas told me that he too had tried to reach Lake, without success. He had not known about the wind. Very little wind was blowing at McMurdo Sound, though it kept raging where we were.

All through the day we listened anxiously. Again and again we tried to reach Lake, but always with no result. About noon a wild, mad wind rushed out of the west. We feared for the safety of our own camp. But in the end it died down, and it came back only a little at two p.m.

After three o'clock it was very quiet, and we tried twice as hard to reach Lake. He had four planes, and each had an excellent short-wave set. We could not imagine an ordinary accident that could break all his wireless sets at once. Still the stony silence went on. We thought of the wild force the wind must have had where he was. Then we could not help making the darkest guesses.

By six o'clock our fears were strong and clear. I talked by wireless with Douglas and Thorfinnssen, and then I decided to go and find out what had happened. We had left the fifth plane at the McMurdo Sound supply cache, with Sherman and two sailors. It was in good shape and ready for use at once. It seemed that the very emergency it had been saved for had now come.

I reached Sherman by wireless. I ordered him to come to the southern base as quickly as possible, with the plane and the two sailors. The air conditions seemed very good for flying. Then we talked about who should go in the search party. We decided to take everyone, together with the sledge and dogs which I had kept with me. Even such a big load would not be too much for one of our huge planes. They had been built to our special orders to carry heavy machinery. From time to time I still tried to reach Lake with the wireless, but it was no use.

Sherman took off at seven thirty with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen. He reported a quiet flight from several points along the way. They arrived at our base at midnight, and at once we all discussed the next move. It was risky to fly over the antarctic in a single plane, without any line of bases. But nobody drew back, because it seemed plainly necessary. First we did some loading of the plane. Then, at two o'clock, we went to bed for a short rest. Four hours later we were up again to finish the loading and packing.

At seven fifteen a.m., January 25th, we started northwest. McTighe was the pilot. We had ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, fuel and food, and other things, including the plane's wireless set. The air was clear, fairly quiet and quite mild. We expected very little trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude that Lake had given for his camp. Our fears were about what we might find, or not find, at the end of our journey. Every call we sent to the camp was still answered only by silence.

Every moment of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my memory, because it was a turning point in my life. On that flight, at the age of fifty-four, I lost all my peace and balance. A normal mind has that peace because it trusts its usual picture of nature and nature's laws.

From then on, the ten of us had to face a world of hidden horrors, far larger and more terrible. The student Danforth and I had to face it more than all the others. Nothing can wipe those horrors from our feelings. We would not share them with the rest of mankind if we could avoid it. The newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plane. They told of our nonstop course and our two battles with dangerous gales high in the air. They told how we saw the broken surface where Lake had sunk his shaft on the way, three days before. And they told of a group of those strange, fluffy snow cylinders. Amundsen and Byrd had seen these rolling in the wind across endless miles of frozen plateau.

There came a point, though, when we could not describe our feelings in any words the press would understand. And later there came a point when we had to make a real rule of strict censorship.

The sailor Larsen was the first to see the jagged line of peaks ahead. They looked like witches' hats and sharp towers. His shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great plane's cabin. We were flying fast, but the peaks grew very slowly. So we knew they must be extremely far away. We could see them only because they were so unusually high.

Little by little, however, they rose darkly into the western sky. We could make out several bare, bleak, blackish summits. In the reddish antarctic light they seemed strange and unreal. Behind them were clouds of ice dust that shone with rainbow colors.

The whole scene held a constant hint of enormous secrecy, and of something about to be revealed. These stark, nightmare peaks seemed like the pylons of a terrible gateway. It led into forbidden worlds of dream, and into strange gulfs of distant time, space and other dimensions. I could not help feeling that they were evil things. They were mountains of madness, and their far slopes looked out over some cursed, final abyss.

That boiling, half-glowing background of clouds suggested something beyond words. It hinted at a dim place far beyond the space of our earth. And it was a terrible reminder of how far away, how lonely and how empty this southern world was. No one had ever walked here or explored its depths, and it had been dead for ages.

It was young Danforth who pointed out the strange regular shapes on the skyline of the higher mountains. They looked like pieces of perfect cubes, clinging to the peaks. Lake had mentioned them in his messages. He had compared them to the dreamlike ruins of ancient temples on cloudy Asian mountaintops. Roerich had painted such scenes in his delicate, strange way. Now I saw that Lake's comparison was right.

There was indeed something like Roerich about this whole unearthly continent of mountains and mystery. I had felt it in October, when we first saw Victoria Land, and I felt it again now. I also felt another wave of uneasy awareness of very old myths. This deadly land was disturbingly like the evil plateau of Leng in the ancient writings.

Experts in myths have placed Leng in Central Asia. But the memory of the human race, or of the races before it, is long. Some tales may have come down from lands, mountains and temples of horror that are older than Asia. They may be older than any human world we know.

A few bold mystics have suggested that the Pnakotic Manuscripts are older than the Pleistocene. Only broken pieces of these writings survive. The same mystics have suggested that the worshippers of Tsathoggua were as non-human as Tsathoggua itself.

Wherever Leng lay in space or time, I did not want to be in it or near it. Nor did I like being near a world that had produced such strange, ancient monsters as Lake had just described. At that moment I was sorry that I had ever read the hated *Necronomicon*. I was sorry, too, that I had talked so much with Wilmarth at the university. He was a folklorist who knew far too much, in an unpleasant way.

This mood surely made my reaction worse to the strange mirage that suddenly appeared. It burst on us from the sky above, which was shining more and more with soft opal colors. By then we were near the mountains and could see the rolling waves of the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages in the weeks before. Some of them were just as strange and vivid as this one. But this one had a completely new and dark quality, like a threatening sign. I trembled as a boiling maze of fantastic walls, towers and minarets rose out of the troubled ice vapors above us.

It looked like a Cyclopean city. Its style of building was unknown to man, and even to human imagination. There were huge masses of night-black stone, which broke the laws of geometry in terrible ways. There were cones with their tops cut off, some of them in steps or with grooves. On top of them stood tall round towers. Here and there the towers swelled out like bulbs. They were often topped with layers of thin disks with wavy edges. There were also strange, overhanging, table-like buildings. They looked like piles of many flat slabs, round plates or five-pointed stars. Each one lay partly over the one below.

There were cones and pyramids made of several parts. Some stood alone. Others stood on top of cylinders or cubes, or on flatter cones and pyramids with cut-off tops. Here and there were needle-like spires in strange groups of five.

All these wild buildings seemed joined together by bridges shaped like tubes. The bridges crossed from one building to another at different dizzy heights. The whole city seemed enormous, and its great size was terrifying and crushing.

It was not unlike some of the wilder mirages seen in the Arctic. The arctic whaler Scoresby saw and drew such mirages in 1820. But at this time and place, things were different. Those dark, unknown peaks rose enormously ahead of us. That strange discovery from an older world was in our minds. And a probable disaster hung like a dark cloud over most of our expedition. So we all seemed to find a hidden evil in the mirage. It seemed like a sign of terrible things to come.

I was glad when the mirage began to break up. But as it broke up, the nightmare towers and cones briefly took on twisted shapes, even bigger and more horrible. The whole picture melted into a swirling mass of opal light. Then we began to look down at the earth again. We saw that the end of our journey was not far away.

The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzily up like a frightening wall of giants. Their strange regular shapes showed with surprising clearness, even without field glasses. We were over the lowest foothills now. Among the snow, ice and bare patches of their main plateau, we could see two darkish spots. We thought they were Lake's camp and the boring.

The higher foothills rose sharply between five and six miles away. They formed a range almost separate from the terrible line of peaks beyond, which were higher than the Himalayas. At last Ropes began to fly down toward the dark spot on the left. He was the student who had taken over the controls from McTighe. By its size, that spot had to be the camp. As he did so, McTighe sent out the last uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our expedition.

Everyone, of course, has read the short and unsatisfying bulletins about the rest of our stay in the antarctic.

Some hours after we landed, we sent a careful report of the tragedy we had found. Unwillingly, we announced that the whole Lake party had been killed. We said the terrible wind of the day before had done it, or the wind of the night before that. Eleven men were known to be dead, and young Gedney was missing.

People forgave us for giving so few clear details. They understood that the sad event must have shocked us. We explained that the wind had torn up all eleven bodies. So they were not fit to carry out of the antarctic. People believed us.

Indeed, I am proud that we hardly ever went beyond the truth in any single detail. We managed this even in the middle of our distress, our total confusion and our deep horror. The real importance lies in what we did not dare to tell. I would not tell it even now, except that I must warn others away from nameless terrors.

It is a fact that the wind had done terrible damage. It is very doubtful that all the men could have lived through it, even without the other thing. The storm was full of madly driven bits of ice. It must have been worse than anything our expedition had met before.

One plane shelter was almost smashed to powder. It seems that all the shelters had been left far too weak and flimsy. And the derrick at the boring, some distance away, was completely shaken to pieces.

The metal parts of the planes and drilling machines that stood in the open were beaten until they shone brightly. Two of the small tents were flattened, though they had been banked with snow. Wooden surfaces left out in the wind were covered with small holes, and their paint was gone. All tracks in the snow had been completely wiped out.

It is also true that we found none of the ancient biological objects whole enough to take away. We did gather some minerals from a huge, tumbled pile. Among them were several of the greenish soapstone pieces. Their odd, rounded five-pointed shape and faint patterns of grouped dots led to so many uncertain comparisons. We also gathered some fossil bones. Among them were the most typical of the strangely injured ones.

None of the dogs survived. Their snow enclosure near the camp had been built in a hurry, and it was almost completely destroyed. The wind may have done that. But the biggest break was on the side next to the camp, which was not the side facing the wind. This suggests that the wild animals themselves had jumped or broken out.

All three sledges were gone. We have tried to explain that the wind may have blown them away into the unknown. The drill and the ice-melting machine at the boring were too badly damaged to be worth saving. So we used them to block up the hole that Lake had blasted. That gateway to the past disturbed us in a way that was hard to name.

We also left at the camp the two planes that were most badly shaken. Our surviving party had only four real pilots in all: Sherman, Danforth, McTighe and Ropes. And Danforth's nerves were in too poor a state for him to fly. We brought back all the books, scientific equipment and other small things we could find. But much had been blown away, in a way we could not really explain. Spare tents and furs were either missing or badly damaged.

It was about four p.m. when we sent our careful message to the *Arkham*, to be passed on. By then we had flown widely around the area, and we had to give Gedney up for lost. I think we did well to keep the message as calm as we did, and to say nothing definite.

The only unrest we spoke about was that of our dogs. From poor Lake's reports, everyone expected them to be wildly uneasy near the biological specimens. But we did not mention, I think, that they were just as uneasy when they sniffed around the greenish soapstones. They were uneasy around certain other objects in that disordered place too. These included scientific instruments, planes and machinery, both at the camp and at the boring. Their parts had been loosened, moved or interfered with in other ways. This must have been done by winds that were very curious and eager to investigate things.

About the fourteen biological specimens, we were vague, and I think we can be forgiven. We said that the only ones we had found were damaged. But we said that enough was left of them to prove Lake's description completely and impressively correct. It was hard to keep our personal feelings out of this matter. We did not mention numbers, or say exactly how we had found the ones we did find. By that time we had agreed not to send any news that suggested madness among Lake's men. Yet it surely looked like madness. We found six damaged monsters, carefully buried upright in snow graves nine feet deep. Over the graves were five-pointed mounds, marked with groups of dots. Their patterns were exactly like those on the strange greenish soapstones, which came from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens that Lake had mentioned seemed to have been completely blown away.

We were careful, too, about the public's peace of mind. So Danforth and I said little about our terrible trip over the mountains the next day. Only a plane made much lighter could possibly cross a range of such height. Mercifully, this meant that only the two of us could make that scouting trip.

When we returned at one a.m., Danforth was close to hysterics. But he controlled himself admirably. He needed no persuading to make three promises. He would not show our sketches, or the other things we brought back in our pockets. He would tell the others nothing more than what we had agreed to send to the outside world. And he would hide our camera films, so that we could develop them privately later. So this part of my present story will be new to the world in general. It will be just as new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman and the rest. Indeed, Danforth keeps secrets even better than I do. He saw, or thinks he saw, one thing that he will not tell even me.

As everyone knows, our report told of a hard climb. It agreed with Lake's opinion about the great peaks. They are made of Archaean slate and other very ancient, folded rock layers. These have not changed since at least the middle of Comanchean times. The report made an ordinary comment on the regular cube and rampart shapes on the slopes. It decided that the cave mouths showed where veins of limestone had dissolved. It guessed that skilled mountain climbers could climb and cross the whole range by certain slopes and passes. And it said that the mysterious other side holds a huge, high superplateau. This is as ancient and unchanging as the mountains themselves. It lies twenty thousand feet high, and strange rock shapes stick out through its thin layer of ice. Low, gentle foothills lie between the plateau's surface and the steep cliffs of the highest peaks.

All this information is true in every way, as far as it goes. It completely satisfied the men at the camp. We had been away for sixteen hours. That was longer than our planned program of flying, landing, scouting and collecting rocks needed. We blamed it on a long period of bad winds, which never really happened. And we told the truth about our landing on the farther foothills.

Luckily our story sounded real and dull enough, so none of the others wanted to copy our flight. If anyone had tried, I would have used all my power of persuasion to stop them. And I do not know what Danforth would have done.

While we were away, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe and Williamson had worked very hard on Lake's two best planes. They made them ready for use again. They did this even though the working parts had been mixed up and moved in a way nobody could explain.

We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back to our old base as soon as possible. That way was not direct, but it was the safest way to get to McMurdo Sound. A straight flight would cross the most completely unknown parts of this continent, which had been dead for ages. That would bring many more dangers.

More exploration was hardly possible, because so many of us had died and our drilling machinery was ruined. The doubts and horrors around us, which we did not reveal, made us want only one thing. We wanted to escape as fast as we could from this southern world of emptiness and dark madness.

As the public knows, we returned to the world without any more disasters. All planes reached the old base on the next evening, January 27th, after a fast nonstop flight. On the 28th we reached McMurdo Sound in two stages. There was only one very short stop. A faulty rudder caused it. This happened in the furious wind over the ice shelf, after we had left the great plateau behind.

Five days later, the *Arkham* and *Miskatonic* were breaking free of the thickening field ice. All the men and equipment were on board, and we were sailing up Ross Sea. To the west, the mocking mountains of Victoria Land rose against a troubled antarctic sky. They twisted the wind's cries into a musical piping over a wide range. It chilled me to the bottom of my soul.

Less than two weeks later we left the last sign of polar land behind us. We thanked heaven that we were free of that haunted, cursed land. There, life and death, space and time have made dark and unholy alliances. They have done this through unknown ages, ever since matter first twisted and swam on the planet's barely cooled crust.

Since our return we have all worked constantly to discourage antarctic exploration. We have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves, all of us loyal and united. Even young Danforth, with his nervous breakdown, has not weakened or talked wildly to his doctors.

Indeed, as I have said, there is one thing he thinks he alone saw. He will not tell it even to me. I think it would help his mind if he agreed to tell it. It might explain and ease much. But perhaps the thing was only a false vision, caused by an earlier shock. That is my impression after those rare, careless moments when he whispers broken words to me. As soon as he gets control of himself again, he strongly denies them.

It will be hard to keep others away from the great white south. Some of our efforts may even harm our cause, because they draw curious attention. We should have known from the start that human curiosity never dies. The results we announced would be enough to push others on in the same age-old search for the unknown.

Lake's reports of those biological monsters had excited naturalists and fossil experts to the highest degree. But we were wise enough not to show the loose parts we had taken from the real buried specimens. Nor did we show our photographs of those specimens as we found them. We also did not show the more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish soapstones. And Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or drew on the superplateau beyond the range. We have also guarded the crumpled things that we smoothed out, studied in terror and brought away in our pockets.

But now the Starkweather-Moore party is getting ready. It is much more thorough than our group ever tried to be. If no one talks them out of it, they will reach the very center of the antarctic. They will melt and bore until they bring up that which we know may end the world. So at last I must break all my silences. I must tell everything, even about that final, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.

### Glossary

- **censorship**: keeping back news or information so that people do not hear it; "uncensored" means nothing was kept back.
- **pylons**: huge gate towers or pillars at an entrance.
- **Leng**: an evil high plateau in old myths, usually placed in Central Asia.
- **Pnakotic Manuscripts**: very old written texts, older than humans perhaps, with secret knowledge about the earth's past.
- **Tsathoggua**: a strange, shapeless, non-human god of old legends.
- **Necronomicon**: a famous, frightening old book of dark magic and secret history, written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
- **folklorist**: a person who studies folklore, the old stories and beliefs of ordinary people.
- **mirage**: an image in the air caused by light bending in cold or hot air; things far away seem to float or change shape.
- **Cyclopean**: made of enormous stone blocks, as if built by giants.
- **minarets**: tall, thin towers, like those beside a mosque.
- **derrick**: the tall frame over a drill hole.
- **Archaean, Comanchean**: periods of the earth's history: the Archaean is the earliest age; the Comanchean is an old American name for part of the age of the dinosaurs.

## IV.

I let my mind go back to Lake's camp only with great unwillingness and disgust. I hate to remember what we really found there. And I hate to remember that other thing beyond the terrible wall of mountains.

I have told of the land ruined by the wind and the damaged shelters. I have told of the disordered machinery and the different kinds of unease in our dogs. I have told of the missing sledges and other things. I have told of the deaths of men and dogs, and of the absence of Gedney. And I have told of the six biological specimens, buried in that insane way. They came from a world forty million years dead. Yet in spite of all their injuries, their bodies were strangely firm and whole. I do not remember whether I mentioned one more thing. When we checked the dogs' bodies, we found that one dog was missing. We did not think much about that until later. Indeed, only Danforth and I have thought about it at all.

The main things I have kept back are about the bodies. They are also about certain small, subtle points. These points may give a terrible and unbelievable kind of logic to what seemed like chaos. Or they may not.

At the time, I tried to keep the men from thinking about those points. It was so much simpler, and so much more normal, to blame everything on madness. We could say that some of Lake's party had gone mad. From the look of things, that demon wind from the mountains could drive any man mad. And this place was the center of all earthly mystery and emptiness.

The worst thing of all, of course, was the condition of the bodies, men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of fight. They were torn and mangled in cruel ways that we could not explain at all. As far as we could judge, each one had died from strangling or from tearing wounds.

The dogs had clearly started the trouble. Their badly built corral had plainly been broken by force from the inside. It had been set some distance from the camp, because the animals hated those hellish ancient creatures. But this care seemed to have been useless. The dogs were left alone in that terrible wind, behind weak walls that were not high enough. They must have panicked and rushed out. Perhaps the wind itself caused it. Or perhaps it was some faint, growing smell from the nightmare specimens. No one could say.

But whatever had happened, it was horrible and disgusting enough. Perhaps I had better stop being delicate and tell the worst at last. First, however, I must state one opinion very firmly. Danforth and I both saw everything with our own eyes, and we reasoned very strictly. We are sure that Gedney, who was then missing, was in no way responsible for the horrors we found.

I have said that the bodies were terribly mangled. Now I must add something more. Some bodies had been cut open, and parts had been taken away, in a very strange, cold and inhuman way. It was the same with dogs and men. All the healthier, fatter bodies, with four legs or with two, had lost their most solid masses of flesh. The flesh had been cut out and removed, as if by a careful butcher. Around the bodies, salt had been strangely sprinkled. It came from the broken food chests on the planes. It brought the most horrible ideas into our minds.

This had happened in one of the rough plane shelters. The plane had been dragged out of it. Later winds had wiped away all tracks that might have given us a reasonable theory. Bits of clothing lay scattered about. They had been roughly slashed from the human bodies that had been cut open. But they gave no clues.

It is useless to mention certain faint prints in the snow. I had a half impression of them in one sheltered corner of the ruined enclosure. They were not human prints at all. But this impression was clearly mixed up with all poor Lake's talk of fossil prints in the weeks before. One had to be careful of one's imagination in the shadow of those huge mountains of madness.

As I have said, in the end Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing. When we came to that terrible shelter, we had missed two dogs and two men. After that we looked at the strange graves. Then we entered the dissecting tent, which was fairly unharmed. And the tent had something to show us.

It was not as Lake had left it. The covered parts of the ancient monster had been taken off the simple table he had set up. Indeed, we had already realized something about the six damaged, insanely buried things. One of them had a trace of a very hateful smell. It must be the collected pieces of the creature that Lake had tried to study.

Other things were spread on and around that laboratory table. It did not take us long to guess what they were. They were the parts of one man and one dog. They had been cut up carefully, but in a strange, unskilled way. I will not say who the man was, to spare the feelings of the people still living.

Lake's instruments for cutting up bodies were missing. But there were signs that they had been carefully cleaned. The gasoline stove was gone too. Around the place where it had stood, we found a strange mess of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men. We buried the dog parts with the other thirty-five dogs. There were strange smudges on the laboratory table. There were also smudges on a pile of roughly handled books with pictures, scattered near it. We were much too confused to guess about them.

This was the worst of the camp horror, but other things were just as puzzling. Many things had disappeared. Gedney was gone, and so were the one dog and the eight undamaged biological specimens. The three sledges were gone. So were certain instruments, and technical and scientific books with pictures. Writing materials, electric torches and batteries, food and fuel were missing too. So were the heating equipment, spare tents, fur suits and other such things. No sane guess could explain all this. Nor could we explain the ink blots with splashed edges on certain pieces of paper. And there were signs of strange, alien fumbling and experiments around the planes. These signs were around all the other machines too, both at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to hate this strangely disordered machinery.

Then, too, the food store had been upset, and certain basic foods had disappeared. There was a heap of tin cans that looked shockingly funny. They had been forced open in the most unlikely ways and in the most unlikely places. A great many matches were scattered about, whole, broken or used. They were another small puzzle. So were two or three tent cloths and fur suits that we found lying about. They had been slashed in strange, unusual ways. Perhaps the cuts came from clumsy attempts to change them in ways we could not imagine.

The cruel treatment of the human and dog bodies fitted in with this apparent madness. It was a madness that seemed to tear everything apart. The crazy burial of the damaged ancient specimens fitted in too. We expected that a situation like the present one might come one day. So we carefully photographed all the main signs of insane disorder at the camp. We shall use the prints to support our pleas against the departure of the planned Starkweather-Moore Expedition.

Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph the row of insane graves. Then we opened them. These were the graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. The strange mounds had clusters of grouped dots on them. We could not help noticing that they were like poor Lake's descriptions of the strange greenish soapstones. Later we found some of the soapstones themselves in the great mineral pile. Then we saw that the likeness was very close indeed.

I must make one thing clear. The whole general shape seemed horribly like the starfish head of the ancient beings. We agreed that this likeness must have had a strong effect on Lake's men. Their minds were already sensitive and overstrained.

For madness was the explanation that everybody chose at once, at least when they spoke. It centered on Gedney, because he was the only one who could have survived to do these things. But I will not be so innocent as to deny one thing. Each of us may have had wild guesses in his mind. Sanity did not let him form them completely.

In the afternoon, Sherman, Pabodie and McTighe made a thorough flight over all the land around us. They searched the horizon with field glasses, looking for Gedney and the various missing things. But they found nothing.

They reported that the giant wall of mountains went on endlessly to the right and to the left. It did not get any lower or change its basic form. On some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart shapes were bolder and clearer. They looked twice as fantastically like the Asian hill ruins in Roerich's paintings. The mysterious cave mouths were on the black summits, which were bare of snow. As far as the range could be followed, the caves seemed spread fairly evenly.

In spite of all the horrors around us, we still had enough pure scientific zeal and love of adventure. We wondered about the unknown land beyond those mysterious mountains.

As our careful messages said, we went to rest at midnight after our day of terror and confusion. But first we made a rough plan. Starting the next morning, we would make one or more high flights across the range. We would use a lightened plane with an aerial camera and a geologist's equipment.

It was decided that Danforth and I should try it first. We woke at seven a.m., meaning to start early. But heavy winds delayed our start until nearly nine o'clock. We mentioned these winds in our short bulletin to the outside world.

I have already repeated the vague story we told the men at camp after our return sixteen hours later. We also sent this story to the outside world. Now it is my terrible duty to add to this account. I must fill in the merciful blanks with hints of what we really saw. We saw it in that hidden world beyond the mountains. These are hints of the discoveries that have finally driven Danforth to a nervous collapse.

I wish he would speak honestly about the thing he thinks he alone saw. It was probably only a trick of his nerves. But perhaps it was the final shock that put him where he is now. Yet he firmly refuses to speak of it. All I can do is repeat his later broken whispers. They are about what made him start screaming as the plane flew back through the pass. The wind was tearing wildly through that pass. This was after the real, solid shock which I shared with him.

This will be my last word. What I tell shows plain signs that ancient horrors still survive. Perhaps that will not be enough to keep others from meddling with the inner antarctic. Perhaps it will not even stop them from digging too deep under the surface of that final wasteland. It is full of forbidden secrets and an unhuman emptiness, cursed for ages. If it is not enough, the responsibility for the evils that follow will not be mine. Those evils may have no name and no limit.

Danforth and I studied the notes Pabodie had made during his afternoon flight. We also checked our position with a sextant. We had worked out that the lowest pass in the range lay a little to our right, within sight of camp. It was about twenty-three thousand or twenty-four thousand feet above sea-level. So we first headed for this point in the lightened plane, as we set out on our flight of discovery.

The camp itself was about twelve thousand feet high. It stood on foothills that rose from a high continental plateau. So the plane did not need to climb as much as it might seem. Even so, as we rose we felt the thin air and the great cold very sharply. We had to leave the cabin windows open, so that we could see well. Of course, we were dressed in our heaviest furs.

We drew near the dark and threatening peaks. They rose above a line of snow cut by crevasses, with glaciers lying between them. More and more we noticed the strangely regular shapes clinging to the slopes. And again we thought of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich.

The ancient, weathered rock layers fully proved all of Lake's bulletins. They showed that these peaks had stood in exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in earth's history. Perhaps it was over fifty million years. It was useless to guess how much higher they had once been. But everything about this strange region pointed to some unknown effects of the air. These effects worked against change. They seemed to slow down the usual ways in which weather breaks up rock.

But the regular cubes, ramparts and cave mouths on the mountainsides fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with field glasses and took aerial photographs while Danforth flew the plane. At times I took over the controls, so that he could use the binoculars. My knowledge of flying was only that of an amateur, though.

We could easily see that much of their material was a lightish Archaean quartzite. It was unlike any rock we could see over wide areas of the general surface. Their regularity was extreme and strange, far beyond what poor Lake had hinted.

As he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded by countless ages of fierce weather. But they were unnaturally solid and made of tough material, and this had saved them from being destroyed. Many parts seemed to be made of exactly the same stuff as the rock surface around them. This was true especially of the parts closest to the slopes.

The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Macchu Picchu in the Andes. Or it looked like the ancient foundation walls of Kish, which the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition dug up in 1929. Both Danforth and I sometimes had the impression of separate Cyclopean blocks. Lake had said that his flying companion Carroll had seen this too.

To be honest, I could not explain such things in this place. As a geologist, I felt strangely humbled. Rocks made from melted rock often have strange regular shapes. The famous Giants' Causeway in Ireland is one example. Lake had first thought he saw smoking cones. But this huge range was clearly not volcanic in its structure.

The strange cave mouths were another puzzle, though a smaller one, because of their regular outline. The odd shapes seemed most common near them. As Lake's bulletin had said, they were often almost square or half-round. It was as if some magic hand had shaped the natural openings to make them more even. There were remarkably many of them, spread over a wide area. This suggested that the whole region was full of tunnels, like a honeycomb. Perhaps these tunnels had been dissolved out of layers of limestone.

We could not see far inside the caves. But we saw that they seemed to be free of stalactites and stalagmites. Outside, the parts of the slopes next to the openings always seemed smooth and regular. Danforth thought that the small cracks and holes made by the weather formed unusual patterns.

His mind was full of the horrors and strange things we had found at the camp. He hinted that the holes looked a little like those puzzling groups of dots. These dots were sprinkled over the ancient greenish soapstones. And they were copied so horribly on the madly made snow mounds above those six buried monsters.

We had risen slowly as we flew over the higher foothills toward the fairly low pass we had chosen. As we went on, we sometimes looked down at the snow and ice of the land route. We wondered whether we could have made the trip with the simpler equipment of earlier days.

Somewhat to our surprise, we saw that the land was far from difficult, as such things go. There were crevasses and other bad places. But they would probably not have stopped the sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers seemed to lead up to passes that the wind had swept bare. Unusually, they went all the way without a break. When we reached our chosen pass, we found that it was no exception.

We were getting ready to go around the top of the pass. Then we would look out over a world no one had ever walked on. Our feelings of tense expectation can hardly be described on paper. Yet we had no reason to think that the lands beyond the range were really different. We did not expect them to be unlike the lands we had already seen and crossed. These mountains had a touch of evil mystery. So did the inviting sea of opal sky that we glimpsed between their summits. But it was a very subtle, faint thing that plain words cannot explain. It was more a matter of vague symbols in the mind and connections with art. It was mixed up with strange poetry and paintings. It was mixed up, too, with ancient myths hidden in forbidden books that people avoid.

Even the sound of the wind held a strange note of conscious evil. For a second, the mixed sound seemed to include a strange musical whistling, a musical piping over a wide range. It came as the wind rushed in and out of the echoing cave mouths, which were everywhere. There was a cloudy note in this sound that reminded me of something disgusting. It was as complex and hard to place as any of our other dark impressions.

We had climbed slowly. Now, according to the aneroid, we were at a height of twenty-three thousand five hundred and seventy feet. The region of clinging snow was clearly below us. Up here there were only dark, bare rock slopes and the beginnings of rough, ridged glaciers. But those strange cubes, ramparts and echoing cave mouths were here too. They added a sense of something unnatural, fantastic and dreamlike.

I looked along the line of high peaks. I thought I could see the one that poor Lake had mentioned, with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed half lost in a strange antarctic haze. Perhaps this kind of haze had given Lake his early idea of volcanoes.

The pass rose right in front of us, smooth and swept by the wind. On each side stood jagged pylons of rock, which seemed to frown at us with evil. Beyond the pass was a sky full of swirling vapors, lit by the low polar sun. It was the sky of that mysterious land on the other side. We felt that no human eye had ever looked upon it.

A few more feet of height, and we would see that land. The wind howled and piped as it raced through the pass. It added to the noise of the engines, which had no silencers. Danforth and I could speak only in shouts, so we exchanged meaningful looks. And then we climbed those last few feet. We did indeed stare across the great dividing line. We looked over the untouched secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth.

### Glossary

- **mangled**: badly torn and crushed.
- **corral**: a fenced area for animals.
- **dissecting tent**: the tent where Lake cut open a specimen to study it.
- **sextant**: an instrument for finding position from the sun or stars.
- **aneroid**: an instrument that measures air pressure and height.
- **crevasses**: deep cracks in a glacier.
- **Archaean quartzite**: very hard rock made of quartz, from the earliest age of the earth.
- **Cyclopean**: made of enormous stone blocks, as if built by giants.
- **Macchu Picchu, Kish**: Macchu Picchu is an old stone city in the mountains of Peru; Kish is a very old city in Iraq, dug up by scientists.
- **Giants' Causeway**: a famous place on the coast of Ireland with thousands of regular, many-sided stone columns made by old volcanic rock.
- **pylons**: huge gate towers or pillars at an entrance.

## V.

I think we both cried out at the same moment. We had finally cleared the pass and could see what lay beyond. We cried out in wonder, in awe, in terror, and in disbelief of our own eyes. Of course, we must have had some natural explanation in the back of our minds. It helped us to stay calm for the moment. Perhaps we thought of the strangely worn stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado. Or we thought of the wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert, with their strangely regular shapes. Perhaps we even half thought that the sight was a mirage. We had seen one like it the morning before, when we first came near those mountains of madness.

We must have had some such normal ideas to hold on to. Our eyes moved across that endless plateau, scarred by storms. We saw an almost endless maze of huge, regular stone shapes. They were geometrical and well balanced. Their worn and pitted tops rose above a sheet of ice. The ice was not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest. In places it was clearly thinner.

The effect of the terrible sight cannot be described. From the first moment, it seemed to break some known law of nature. Here was an ancient table-land, fully twenty thousand feet high. Its climate had been too deadly to live in for at least five hundred thousand years. It had been so since before there were humans. Yet across it, almost as far as we could see, stretched a tangle of orderly stone. Only a mind desperately defending itself could believe that it had a natural cause. Surely it had been made by thinking beings, on purpose.

Before this, we had not seriously believed that the cubes and ramparts on the mountainsides were anything but natural. How could they be anything else? This region had fallen under the endless rule of icy death long ago. At that time, man could hardly have been told apart from the great apes.

But now our reason was badly shaken. This Cyclopean maze of square, curved and angled blocks left us no comfortable escape. It was, very clearly, the evil city of the mirage. Now it stood before us, solid, real and impossible to deny. That cursed warning in the sky had had a real cause after all. There had been a flat layer of ice dust high in the air. It had reflected the image of these shocking stone ruins across the mountains, by the simple laws of light. Of course, the ghostly picture had been twisted and exaggerated. It had also shown things that the real city did not have. But now we saw the real city. It seemed even more terrible and threatening than its distant image.

The towers and ramparts were incredibly huge and heavy, beyond anything human. Only this had saved the terrible place from complete destruction. It had stood there for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps millions, in the winds of that cold high land. "Corona Mundi—Roof of the World——" All kinds of strange phrases came to our lips. We looked down at the unbelievable sight and felt dizzy.

I thought again of the strange old myths. They had followed me without rest since I first saw this dead antarctic world. I thought of the evil plateau of Leng and of the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men of the Himalayas. I thought of the Pnakotic Manuscripts, which suggest a time before humans. I thought of the Cthulhu cult and of the *Necronomicon*. And I thought of the Hyperborean legends of shapeless Tsathoggua. They also tell of the "star spawn" connected with that half-being, which are worse than shapeless.

The city stretched away for endless miles in every direction, with very little thinning. Our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gentle foothills. These hills separated it from the real edge of the mountains. We decided that we could see no thinning at all. There was only one break, to the left of the pass we had come through. By pure chance, we had found only a small part of something of enormous size.

There were fewer strange stone buildings on the foothills. They joined the terrible city to the cubes and ramparts that we already knew. These clearly formed its outposts in the mountains. The cubes and ramparts were as many on the inner side of the mountains as on the outer side. So were the strange cave mouths.

The nameless stone maze was made mostly of walls. Above the ice they were from ten to one hundred and fifty feet high. They were from five to ten feet thick. Most of the walls were made of huge blocks of dark, ancient slate, schist and sandstone. Many blocks were as large as 4 × 6 × 8 feet. In several places, though, the walls seemed to be carved out of solid, uneven bedrock of pre-Cambrian slate.

The buildings were not at all equal in size. There were countless honeycomb groups that covered huge areas. There were also smaller, separate buildings.

Most of these buildings had the shape of cones, pyramids or terraces. But there were also many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, groups of cubes and other rectangular forms. Here and there were some strange angled buildings. Their five-pointed ground plan was a little like modern forts. The builders had used the arch often and with great skill. There had probably been domes too, when the city was at its best.

The whole tangle was very badly worn by the weather. The ice around the towers was covered with fallen blocks and ancient rubble. Where the ice was clear, we could see the lower parts of the giant buildings. We noticed stone bridges that the ice had kept safe. They joined the different towers at different heights above the ground. On the open walls we could see scarred places. Other bridges of the same kind, higher up, had once been there.

When we looked more closely, we saw countless large windows. Some were closed with shutters made of wood that had turned to stone. But most of them stood wide open, dark and threatening.

Many of the ruins, of course, had no roofs. Their top edges were uneven, but the wind had rounded them. Other buildings had kept their shapes whole, despite the wearing and pitting all around. These were the sharper cones and pyramids, or buildings protected by higher ones around them. With the field glass we could just see what looked like carved decorations. They ran in horizontal bands. Among them were those strange groups of dots. We had seen them on the ancient soapstones. Now they seemed far more important.

In many places the buildings were completely ruined. There the ice sheet was deeply split, from various geological causes. In other places the stonework was worn down to the level of the ice. One wide strip of land had no buildings at all. It ran from the inner part of the plateau to a gap in the foothills. This gap was about a mile to the left of the pass we had crossed. We decided that it was probably the bed of a great river. In Tertiary times, millions of years ago, the river had flowed through the city. Then it had poured into some huge abyss under the great mountain range. Certainly this was, above all, a land of caves, deep holes and underground secrets that no human could reach.

When I look back at our feelings, I can only wonder that we stayed as calm as we did. We were stunned by this survival from ages that we had thought were before all humans. Of course, we knew that something was terribly wrong. It was either our dating of time, our scientific theory, or our own minds. Yet we kept enough control to fly the plane. We watched many things very closely. We also took a careful series of photographs. They may still be of great use, both to us and to the world.

In my case, my long scientific habit may have helped. I was confused and felt danger all around. But above all this burned a strong curiosity. I wanted to learn more of this ancient secret. I wanted to know what kind of beings had built this huge place and lived in it. And I wanted to know about such a great center of life. How had it been connected with the rest of the world, in its time or in other times?

For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have been the heart and center of some ancient, unbelievable chapter of earth's history. Its wider effects are remembered only dimly, in the darkest and most twisted myths. That chapter had disappeared completely in the great upheavals of the earth. This happened long before any human race we know had climbed out of its life as apes.

Here lay a Palaeogaean megalopolis. Compared with it, the legendary Atlantis and Lemuria were new things of today, not even of yesterday. The same was true of Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and of Olathoë in the land of Lomar. This megalopolis belonged with those unholy places from before the time of humans. People speak of them only in whispers. They are Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City of Arabia Deserta.

We flew above that tangle of giant towers. Sometimes my imagination broke free of all limits. It wandered without aim through strange ideas. It even made links between this lost world and some of my own wildest dreams. They were dreams about the mad horror at the camp.

To make the plane lighter, we had only partly filled the fuel tank. So now we had to be careful in our explorations. Even so, we covered a huge area of ground, or rather of air. We had dived down low, to a level where there was almost no wind.

There seemed to be no end to the mountain range, or to the terrible stone city along its inner foothills. We flew fifty miles in each direction. We saw no great change in the maze of rock and stonework. It reached up through the eternal ice like the claws of a dead body.

There were, though, some very interesting differences. One was the carvings on the canyon where the wide river had once cut through the foothills. There it had come near the place where it sank into the great range.

At the river's entrance, the high rocks on each side had been boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons. Their designs were ridged and barrel-shaped. Something about them stirred up strange half-memories in both Danforth and me. They were vague, hateful and confusing.

We also found several open spaces shaped like stars. They were clearly public squares. We noticed that the ground rose and fell in various places. Where a steep hill rose, it was usually hollowed out into some kind of large, rambling stone building. But there were at least two exceptions. One was too badly worn to show what had once stood on the high point. The other still had a strange cone-shaped monument on it. It was carved out of the solid rock. It was rather like the well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra.

We flew inland from the mountains. We found that the city was not endless in width, though its length along the foothills seemed endless. After about thirty miles the strange stone buildings began to thin out. After ten more miles we came to an empty waste land. There were almost no signs of anything made by thinking beings. Beyond the city, the course of the river seemed to be marked by a wide, low line. The land became a little rougher. It seemed to rise slightly as it went away into the misty west.

So far we had not landed. But we could not imagine leaving the plateau without trying to enter some of the huge buildings. So we decided to find a smooth place on the foothills near the pass that we could fly through. We would land the plane there and get ready to explore on foot.

These gentle slopes were partly covered with scattered ruins. But by flying low we soon found plenty of possible landing places. We chose the one nearest to the pass. Our next flight would be across the great range and back to camp. At about twelve thirty p.m. we landed safely on a smooth, hard snow field. There were no obstacles on it at all. It was also well suited for a quick, easy take-off later.

We would be gone for only a short time, and there were no high winds at this level. So we did not think it was necessary to build a wall of snow around the plane. We only made sure that the landing skis were safely fixed. And we protected the most important parts of the machine against the cold.

For our walk we took off the heaviest of our flying furs. We took a small set of equipment with us. It held a pocket compass, a hand camera, some light food, and many notebooks and paper. It also held a geologist's hammer and chisel, specimen bags and a coil of climbing rope. Last, there were powerful electric torches with extra batteries. We had brought this equipment in the plane in case we could land somewhere. Then we could take pictures on the ground, make drawings and maps, and collect rock samples. We could get them from a bare slope, a rock face or a mountain cave.

Luckily, we had a supply of extra paper. We could tear it up and put it in a spare specimen bag. Then we could use it to mark our way in any mazes inside. We would use it like the players in the old game of hare and hounds. We had brought it in case we found a cave system where the air was quiet. In still air, paper was a quick and easy way to mark a trail. Usually you mark a trail by chipping marks on the rock.

We walked carefully downhill over the hard crust of snow. Before us, the huge stone maze rose against the opal-colored western sky. We had almost the same strong feeling that wonders were near as we had felt four hours before. Then we had been flying toward the unknown mountain pass.

It was true that we had already seen the incredible secret hidden by the mountain peaks. But soon we would actually enter ancient walls built by thinking beings. They were built perhaps millions of years ago, before any known race of men could have existed. This was no less awesome. And it was possibly terrible, because it suggested that something was deeply wrong with the universe as we knew it.

At this great height, the thin air made hard work a little more difficult than usual. But both Danforth and I found that we were doing very well. We felt able to do almost any task that might come to us.

After only a few steps we came to a shapeless ruin, worn down level with the snow. Ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge rampart with no roof. Its giant five-pointed shape was still complete. It rose to an uneven height of ten or eleven feet. We walked toward it. At last we could actually touch its worn Cyclopean blocks. We felt that we had made a new and almost unholy link with forgotten ages. Those ages were normally closed to our kind.

This rampart was shaped like a star, perhaps three hundred feet from point to point. It was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of different sizes. On average their surface was 6 × 8 feet. There was a row of arched loopholes or windows, about four feet wide and five feet high. They were spaced quite evenly along the points of the star and at its inner angles. Their bottoms were about four feet above the icy surface.

We looked through these windows. We could see that the stone walls were fully five feet thick. No inner walls were left. On the inside walls there were traces of carvings in bands. We had already guessed these facts when we flew low over this rampart and others like it. There must once have been lower parts too. But all signs of them were now completely hidden by the deep layer of ice and snow here.

We crawled through one of the windows. We tried to understand the almost worn-away designs on the walls, but we could not. We did not try to dig into the icy floor. Our flights had shown us that many buildings in the city itself had less ice inside. Perhaps we could find completely clear rooms there that led down to the real ground level. We would have to enter buildings that still had their roofs.

Before we left the rampart, we photographed it carefully. We studied its Cyclopean stonework, built without any mortar, and we were completely puzzled. We wished that Pabodie were there. With his knowledge of engineering, he might have helped us guess how such giant blocks had been moved. It must have been done in that unbelievably distant age when the city and its outskirts were built.

Then we walked half a mile downhill to the city itself. Behind us, the upper wind screamed wildly but uselessly through the high peaks. Every little detail of that walk will always stay burned into my mind. Other people could imagine such sights only in wild nightmares.

Between us and the moving mists of the west lay that huge tangle of dark stone towers. Its strange, incredible forms struck us again from every new angle. It was a mirage in solid stone. Without the photographs, I would still doubt that such a thing could exist. The kind of stonework was the same as in the rampart we had studied. But in the city it took wild shapes that are beyond all description.

Even the pictures show only one or two sides of it. They cannot show its endless variety, its unnatural heaviness and its completely alien strangeness. There were geometrical forms that even Euclid could hardly have named. There were cones of every kind, irregular or with their tops cut off. There were terraces with strange, disturbing proportions. There were shafts with odd bulging swellings, and broken columns in curious groups. And there were five-pointed or five-ridged shapes of a mad strangeness.

As we came nearer, we could see beneath some clear parts of the ice sheet. We could see some of the tube-shaped stone bridges. They joined the crazily scattered buildings at different heights. There seemed to be no orderly streets at all. The only wide open strip was a mile to the left. There the ancient river had surely flowed through the town into the mountains.

Our field glasses showed many outside bands of carvings and dot groups, almost worn away. They were very common. We could half imagine how the city must once have looked. Most of the roofs and tower tops had, of course, been destroyed.

As a whole, it had been a confusing tangle of twisted lanes and alleys. All of them were like deep canyons. Some were almost tunnels, because of the stonework hanging over them or the bridges arching above them.

Now it lay spread out below us like a dream. Behind it was a mist in the west. Through its northern end the low, reddish antarctic sun of early afternoon was trying to shine. For a moment the sun was blocked by thicker mist, and the scene fell into shadow. The effect was quietly threatening in a way I can never hope to describe. We could not feel the wind down here. But its faint howling and piping in the great mountain passes behind us took on a wilder note. It sounded as if it had an evil purpose.

The last part of our walk down to the town was unusually steep. A rock ledge stuck out at the edge where the slope changed. It made us think that an artificial terrace had once been there. Under the ice, we believed, there must be steps or something like them.

At last we entered the town itself. We climbed over fallen stonework. The worn, pitted walls stood close around us and towered high above us. They pressed on us and made us feel very small. Once more our feelings were so strong that I wonder how much self-control we kept.

Danforth was openly nervous. He began to make unpleasant guesses about the horror at the camp. They had nothing to do with our work here. I disliked them all the more because I could not help sharing some of them. Many things in this sick survival from a nightmare past forced these ideas on us.

His guesses worked on his imagination too. In one place, an alley full of rubble turned a sharp corner. There he said that he saw faint marks on the ground that he did not like. In another place he stopped to listen to a soft sound that he imagined. It came from somewhere he could not point to. He said it was a muffled musical piping. It was not unlike the wind in the mountain caves, but it was somehow different, in a disturbing way.

Five points were everywhere, in the buildings around us and in the few wall patterns we could make out. This had a dark meaning that we could not escape. Deep inside, it gave us a terrible certainty. It told us something about the ancient beings that had built and lived in this unholy place.

Still, our scientific and adventurous spirits were not quite dead. Almost without thinking, we carried out our plan. We chipped samples from all the different kinds of rock in the stonework. We wanted a fairly full set, so that we could judge the age of the place better.

Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to be later than the Jurassic and Comanchean periods. And no piece of stone in the whole place was more recent than the Pliocene age. It was plain and certain. We were walking in a death that had ruled here for at least five hundred thousand years. Very probably it had ruled even longer.

We went on through this maze, in the dim light of the stone shadows. We stopped at every opening we could reach. We studied the insides and looked for ways to get in. Some openings were too high for us. Others led only into ruins choked with ice. They had no roofs and were as empty as the rampart on the hill.

One opening was large and inviting, but it opened onto a seemingly bottomless abyss. We could see no way to climb down. Now and then we were able to study the stone wood of a shutter that had survived. We could still see the grain of the wood, and it showed how incredibly old it was. This wood came from trees of the Mesozoic age, such as conifers and other trees with cones. Most of all it came from Cretaceous cycads. Some came from fan palms and early flowering plants of clearly Tertiary date. We could find nothing that was certainly later than the Pliocene.

The edges of these shutters showed that they once had strange hinges. The hinges had disappeared long ago. The shutters were not all placed in the same way. Some were on the outer side of the deep window openings, and some on the inner side. They seemed to have become stuck firmly in place. That was how they had lasted after their fittings, probably of metal, had rusted away.

After a while we found a row of windows in the bulges of a huge five-sided cone. Its top was undamaged. The windows led into a vast, well-preserved room with a stone floor. But they were too high above the floor for us to climb down without a rope. We had a rope with us. But we did not want to bother with this twenty-foot drop unless we had to. The air on the plateau was thin, and hard work was a great strain on the heart.

This enormous room was probably a hall or meeting place of some kind. Our electric torches showed bold, clear sculptures around the walls, which could be startling. They were arranged in wide horizontal bands. Between them were equally wide strips of regular curving patterns. We made a careful note of this place. We planned to come in here if we did not find an easier way into some building.

At last, though, we found exactly the opening we wanted. It was an archway about six feet wide and ten feet high. It had once been the end of a bridge high in the air. This bridge had crossed an alley about five feet above the present level of the ice. Of course, such archways were level with upper floors. In this case, one of the floors still existed.

The building that we could enter here was on our left, facing west. It was a series of rectangular terraces. Across the alley was the other archway, wide open. It belonged to a ruined cylinder with no windows. It had a strange bulge about ten feet above the opening. Inside it was totally dark. The archway seemed to open onto a well of endless emptiness.

Piles of rubble made it doubly easy to enter the huge building on the left. Yet for a moment we hesitated. We had wanted this chance for a long time. We were already deep inside this tangle of ancient mystery. But it took fresh courage to actually go inside a complete building. This building came from a legendary older world. And the nature of that world was becoming more and more horribly clear to us.

In the end, however, we took the step. We climbed up over the rubble into the open archway. The floor beyond was made of great slabs of slate. It seemed to be the end of a long, high corridor with carved walls.

We saw the many archways inside that led off from it. We realized that the rooms inside probably formed a very complicated maze. So we decided that we had to begin our paper trail, as in hare and hounds. Until now our compasses had been enough to keep us from getting lost. We had also often seen the great mountain range between the towers behind us. But from now on we would need this other way to find our path.

So we tore our extra paper into pieces of a good size. We put them in a bag for Danforth to carry. We planned to use them as sparingly as safety would allow. This method would probably keep us from getting lost. There did not seem to be any strong air currents inside the ancient stonework. If strong currents did start, or if our paper ran out, we could of course use the other method. Chipping the rock was safer, but it was slow and dull work.

We could not guess how large an area we had opened up without trying. The different buildings were closely and often connected. So we might be able to cross from one to another on bridges under the ice. Only collapses and geological cracks in some places would stop us. Very little ice seemed to have got into the massive buildings.

Through almost all the areas of clear ice, we had seen windows below the ice surface. They were tightly shuttered. It was as if the town had been left in that same state until the ice sheet came. The ice had then frozen the lower part for all time to come. In fact, we had a strange feeling about this place. It seemed to have been closed and left on purpose, in some dim, distant age. It did not seem to have been destroyed by a sudden disaster, or even by slow decay. Had the people known that the ice was coming? Had a nameless people left all together, to look for a home less doomed?

The exact way in which the ice sheet had formed here would have to be explained later. Clearly the ice had not come as a moving, grinding mass. Perhaps the weight of piled-up snow had caused it. Perhaps a flood had helped to create the special state we now saw. It might have come from the river, or from the bursting of some ancient ice dam in the great range. Imagination could think of almost anything in connection with this place.

### Glossary

- **Cyclopean**: made of enormous stone blocks, as if built by giants.
- **mirage**: an image in the air caused by light bending in cold or hot air; things far away seem to float or change shape.
- **rampart**: a thick defensive wall.
- **pylons**: huge gate towers or pillars at an entrance.
- **Palaeogaean megalopolis**: a very large city belonging to the very old earth, before the continents of today.
- **Leng**: an evil high plateau in old myths, usually placed in Central Asia.
- **Mi-Go**: creatures from space, half fungus and half crab-like animal; in the Himalayas people call them the Abominable Snow Men.
- **Pnakotic Manuscripts**: very old written texts, older than humans perhaps, with secret knowledge about the earth's past.
- **Tsathoggua**: a shapeless, toad-like god of old legends; "star spawn" are creatures born of or from the stars.
- **Hyperborean**: from Hyperborea, a legendary land in the far north, destroyed by the cold.
- **Atlantis, Lemuria, Commoriom, Uzuldaroum, Olathoë, Lomar, Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib, Mnar, the Nameless City**: names of lost cities and lands from old legends and myths.
- **rods**: an old measure of length, about five meters.
- **hare and hounds**: a game where one person leaves a paper trail for others to follow.
- **cycads**: ancient plants that look a little like palm trees; they grew in the age of the dinosaurs.
- **Jurassic, Comanchean, Cretaceous, Tertiary, Pliocene**: periods of the earth's history; the first three belong to the age of the dinosaurs, the last two come after it.

## VI.

It would be clumsy to tell the full story of our wanderings step by step. We wandered inside that cave-like honeycomb of ancient stonework, dead for ages. It was a huge home of old secrets. Now, for the first time after countless ages, it echoed to the steps of human feet.

This is especially true because so much of the horrible drama and discovery came simply from studying the wall carvings. They were everywhere. Our flash-light photographs of those carvings will do much to prove the truth of what we are now telling. It is a great pity that we did not have more film with us. As it was, we made rough sketches in our notebooks of certain important features. We did this after all our film was used up.

The building we had entered was very large and richly built. It gave us a strong idea of the architecture of that nameless age in the earth's past. The inner walls were less massive than the outer walls. But on the lower floors they were very well preserved. The whole building was a complicated maze. The floors were at strangely uneven levels. We would certainly have been lost at the very beginning without our trail of torn paper.

We decided to explore the more ruined upper parts first. So we climbed up through the maze for about one hundred feet. There the top floor of rooms stood open and broken to the polar sky, full of snow. We climbed up steep stone ramps with ribs across them. Everywhere these sloping ramps were used instead of stairs.

The rooms we found had every shape and size you could imagine. Some were five-pointed stars, some were triangles and some were perfect cubes. It might be safe to say that on average they were about 30 × 30 feet in floor area. They were about twenty feet high. But there were also many larger rooms.

We examined the upper parts and the level of the ice carefully. Then we went down, floor by floor, into the part under the ice. Soon we saw that we were in an unbroken maze of connected rooms and passages. It probably went on over huge areas outside this building.

The Cyclopean size and weight of everything around us began to press on us strangely. There was something unhuman about all of the unholy, ancient stonework, vaguely but deeply. It was in all the shapes, sizes, proportions and decorations, and in the small details of how it was built. We soon learned from the carvings that this huge city was many million years old.

We cannot yet explain the engineering methods used to balance and fit the huge rock masses in such strange ways. But the builders had clearly depended a great deal on the arch. The rooms we visited had nothing in them that could be carried away. This supported our belief that the city had been left on purpose. The main decoration was the carving on the walls, which was found almost everywhere. It usually ran in long horizontal bands, three feet wide. These bands went from floor to ceiling. They took turns with bands of the same width filled with geometrical arabesques.

There were exceptions to this pattern, but it was by far the most common. Often, however, a row of smooth cartouches was sunk along one of the arabesque bands. They held strangely patterned groups of dots.

We soon saw that the technique was mature and skillful. As art it was developed to the highest level of civilized mastery. But in every detail it was completely alien to any known art of the human race. No sculpture I have ever seen could come near it in fineness of work. The carvings were bold and large. Yet the smallest details of rich plant life or animal life were shown with amazing liveliness. And the regular patterns were wonders of skillful complexity.

The arabesques showed a deep use of mathematics. They were made of curves and angles with a hidden symmetry, all based on the number five.

The picture bands followed a very strict tradition. They used perspective in a strange way. But they had an artistic power that moved us deeply, even across the huge gap of geological ages.

Their way of drawing depended on a strange mixture. It put a cross section of a thing next to its flat outline. It also showed a deep, careful understanding of the mind, beyond that of any known ancient race. It is useless to compare this art with any in our museums. People who see our photographs will probably find something close to it in the strange ideas of the boldest futurists.

The lines of the arabesque patterns were all cut into the wall. On walls that the weather had not worn, they were one to two inches deep. Sometimes there were cartouches with groups of dots. These were clearly writing in some unknown, ancient language and alphabet. Their smooth surface was sunk perhaps an inch and a half. The dots were sunk perhaps half an inch more. The picture bands were carved in sunken low relief. Their background was cut about two inches below the original surface of the wall.

In some places we could see marks of old colors. But mostly the countless ages had destroyed any paint that may have been used. The more we studied the wonderful technique, the more we admired these things. Under the strict rules of the style, we could see how exactly and carefully the artists had observed. We could see their great skill in drawing. In fact, the rules of the style themselves helped to show the true nature of each thing. They made clear what made every object special and different.

We also felt that there were other excellent qualities hidden beyond what we could sense. Here and there, certain touches gave vague hints of hidden symbols and messages. Perhaps a different kind of mind and feeling could have understood them. Fuller or different senses might have helped too. Then they might have had a deep and moving meaning for us.

The subjects of the sculptures clearly came from the life of the lost age when they were made. Much of it was clearly history. The ancient race had an unusual, strong interest in its own history. By pure chance, this worked wonderfully in our favor. It made the carvings so amazingly full of information for us. For this reason, we put photographing and copying them above everything else.

In certain rooms the usual pattern was changed. There were maps, charts of the stars and other scientific designs on a larger scale. These things confirmed, in a simple and terrible way, what we learned from the picture friezes and dados.

I can only hint at what the whole story revealed. I hope that my account will not make anyone more curious than is wise and safe. I mean those who believe me at all. It would be tragic if anyone went to that land of death and horror because of this warning. The warning is meant to keep them away.

The carved walls were broken by high windows and massive twelve-foot doorways. Some of these still had the real shutters and doors, made of wooden planks turned to stone. They were richly carved and polished. All metal fittings had disappeared long ago. But some of the doors were still in place. We had to push them aside as we went from room to room.

Here and there, window frames with strange clear panes survived. Most of the panes were oval, but there were not many of them. There were also many large niches in the walls. Most were empty. But once in a while a niche held some strange object carved from green soapstone. It was either broken or perhaps not thought good enough to take away.

Other openings were surely connected with old machines for heating, lighting and so on. Many of the carvings suggested this kind of thing. The ceilings were usually plain. But sometimes they had been set with tiles of green soapstone or other stone. Most of these had now fallen. The floors were also covered with such tiles in places, though plain stone was more common.

As I have said, all furniture and other movable things were gone. But the sculptures gave us a clear idea of the strange objects that had once filled these rooms. Now the rooms were like tombs, full of echoes. Above the ice sheet, the floors were usually thick with rubbish, broken stone and rubble. But farther down there was less.

In some of the lower rooms and corridors there was little more than gritty dust or ancient crusts. And in some places the floor looked strangely clean, as if it had just been swept. Of course, where cracks or collapses had happened, the lower floors were as full of rubble as the upper ones.

There was a central court, as we had seen in other buildings from the air. It kept the inner parts from total darkness. So in the upper rooms we seldom needed our electric torches, except when we studied the details of the carvings. Below the ice cap, however, the half-light grew darker. In many parts of the tangled ground floor it was almost completely black.

What did we think and feel as we went deeper into this silent maze of unhuman stonework? To get even a simple idea, you must put together a confused mix of passing moods, memories and impressions. The terrible age of the place and its deadly emptiness were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person. But there was more. There was the recent horror at the camp that no one could explain. And there were the discoveries that the terrible wall carvings around us soon forced on us.

Then we came to a perfect section of carving. There could be no doubt about its meaning. It took only a short study to give us the horrible truth. It would be foolish to say that Danforth and I had not each suspected it before. But we had carefully avoided even hinting at it to each other. Now there could be no more merciful doubt. We knew what kind of beings had built this huge dead city and lived in it. They had done so millions of years ago. At that time man's ancestors were simple, primitive mammals. Huge dinosaurs walked across the tropical plains of Europe and Asia.

Before this, each of us had privately held on to one desperate hope. We had told ourselves that the five-pointed shape everywhere meant only one thing. It was a cultural or religious honor paid to the ancient natural object that so clearly had five points. Other peoples had done the same. In the decoration of Minoan Crete it was the sacred bull. In Egypt it was the scarab beetle, and in Rome the wolf and the eagle. Various wild tribes honored some chosen totem animal.

But now this only escape was taken from us. We had to face clearly the idea that shook our reason. The reader of these pages has surely guessed it long ago. I can hardly bear to write it down in black and white even now. But perhaps that will not be necessary.

The beings that once built and lived in this terrible stonework, in the age of dinosaurs, were not dinosaurs. They were far worse. Dinosaurs were new and almost brainless things. But the builders of the city were wise and old. They had left certain marks in rocks that were already nearly a thousand million years old at that time. Those rocks had formed before true earth life had grown beyond soft groups of cells. They had formed before true earth life had existed at all.

They were the makers of that life, and they had made it their slave. Beyond all doubt they were the originals of the evil ancient myths. Books like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the *Necronomicon* hint at these myths in fear. They were the great "Old Ones" that had come down from the stars when the earth was young. An alien evolution had shaped their bodies. They had powers that this planet had never produced. And to think of it! Only the day before, Danforth and I had looked at pieces of them, fossilized for ages. And poor Lake and his men had seen their complete shapes——

We learned what we know about that terrible chapter of life before humans in many stages. Of course, I cannot describe these stages in their proper order. After the first shock of this certain discovery, we had to stop for a while to recover. It was fully three o'clock before we began our real tour of careful, systematic research.

The sculptures in the building we had entered were from a fairly late date. They were perhaps two million years old. We checked this by geological, biological and astronomical features. Their art would be called decadent compared with the carvings we found in older buildings. We reached those buildings later, by crossing bridges under the ice sheet.

One building was cut out of the solid rock. It seemed to go back forty or even fifty million years, to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous. Its bas-reliefs were finer than anything else we found, with one huge exception. We have since agreed that it was the oldest home we passed through.

Our flash-light photographs will soon be made public. Without their support, I would not tell what I found and what I concluded. I would be afraid of being locked up as a madman. Of course, the very earliest parts of this story, made of many pieces, are another matter. They showed the life of the star-headed beings before they came to earth. They lived on other planets, in other galaxies and in other universes. These parts can easily be explained as the beings' own fantastic mythology. Yet sometimes they included designs and diagrams that were strangely close to the latest discoveries of mathematics and astrophysics. I hardly know what to think. Let others judge when they see the photographs I shall publish.

Naturally, no single set of carvings that we found told more than a small part of any connected story. And we did not come upon the different stages of that story in their proper order. Some of the huge rooms were separate units as far as their designs were concerned. In other cases, one continuous history ran through a series of rooms and corridors.

The best maps and diagrams were on the walls of a terrible deep hollow below even the ancient ground level. It was a cavern, perhaps two hundred feet square and sixty feet high. It had almost certainly been a place of teaching of some kind.

The same material was repeated many times in different rooms and buildings, which was annoying. Different artists or people who lived there clearly had their favorite parts of the race's experience. They also liked certain summaries or stages of the race's history. Sometimes, though, different versions of the same subject were useful. They helped us settle doubtful points and fill in gaps.

I still wonder that we worked out so much in the short time we had. Of course, even now we have only the barest outline. And much of that came later, from studying the photographs and sketches we made.

This later study may be the direct cause of Danforth's present breakdown. It brought back memories and vague impressions. These worked together with his sensitive nature. They also worked together with that last horror he believes he saw. He will not tell even me what it was.

But it had to be done. We could not give our warning wisely without the fullest possible information. And giving that warning is of the greatest importance. In that unknown antarctic world, time is disordered and the laws of nature are alien. Certain influences still remain there. Because of them, it is absolutely necessary to discourage any further exploration.

### Glossary

- **Cyclopean**: made of enormous stone blocks, as if built by giants.
- **arabesques**: decorative patterns of curved lines and shapes.
- **cartouches**: framed, smooth panels with writing (here the dot groups).
- **low relief / bas-reliefs**: carvings that stand out only a little from a flat wall.
- **futurists**: modern artists of the early 1900s who painted bold, broken shapes and movement.
- **friezes and dados**: long bands of carved pictures along a wall; the dado is the lower part of the wall.
- **niches**: hollow places in a wall.
- **decadent**: in decline; later and of lower quality.
- **Old Ones**: very old, intelligent creatures from the stars who lived on earth long before humans.
- **Pnakotic Manuscripts**: very old written texts, older than humans perhaps, with secret knowledge about the earth's past.
- **scarab beetle** and **totem animal**: animals that ancient peoples honored as holy signs of their gods or their tribe.
- **Eocene, Cretaceous**: periods of the earth's history; the Cretaceous was in the age of the dinosaurs, and the Eocene came soon after it.

## VII.

The full story, as far as we could read it, will later appear in an official bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I will only give the most important points, in a loose and wandering way. Myth or not, the carvings told how those star-headed things came to the young, lifeless earth from outer space. They told of their coming, and of the coming of many other strange beings. Beings of that kind sometimes set out to explore across space.

They seemed able to fly through the space between the stars on their huge, thin wings of skin. This strangely matched some odd folklore from the hills. A colleague who studies old things told it to me long ago. The beings had lived a great deal under the sea. There they built fantastic cities. They fought terrible battles against nameless enemies with complex machines. These machines used kinds of energy that we do not know.

Clearly their science and their knowledge of machines were far greater than man's today. But they used the more complex forms of it only when they had to.

Some of the carvings suggested that on other planets they had once lived a life full of machines. But they had turned away from it, because it did not satisfy them emotionally. Their bodies were extremely tough, and their natural needs were simple. So they could live a high, civilized life without many manufactured things. They did not even need clothes, except sometimes as protection against the weather.

It was under the sea that they first created life on earth. At first they did it for food, and later for other reasons. They used the materials they found there, and followed methods they had known for a long time.

The more complex experiments came after they had destroyed various enemies from space. They had done the same thing on other planets. There they had made the foods they needed. But they had also made certain masses of living jelly with many cells. Under the power of hypnosis, these masses could shape their bodies into all kinds of temporary organs. In this way they became perfect slaves for the heavy work of the community.

These thick, sticky masses were surely the "Shoggoths" that Abdul Alhazred whispered about in his terrible *Necronomicon*. But even that mad Arab had not suggested that any of them lived on earth. He said they existed only in the dreams of people who had chewed a certain drug plant.

The star-headed Old Ones on this planet first made their simple food forms. They also bred a good supply of Shoggoths. Then they allowed other groups of cells to develop into other forms of animal and plant life, for different purposes. They destroyed any of them that became a nuisance.

The Shoggoths could stretch their bodies to lift enormous weights. With their help, the small, low cities under the sea grew into vast, impressive mazes of stone. These were not unlike the cities that later rose on land. In fact, the Old Ones could adapt to almost anything. They had lived a lot on land in other parts of the universe. They probably kept many traditions of building on land.

We studied the buildings of all these carved cities of the ancient earth. Among them was the city whose dead, ages-old corridors we were walking through at that very moment. And we noticed a strange coincidence. We have not yet tried to explain it, even to ourselves. In the real city around us, the tops of the buildings had of course become shapeless ruins ages ago. But the carvings showed them clearly. There were great groups of needle-like spires. There were fine pointed decorations on top of certain cones and pyramids. And on top of round towers there were layers of thin, flat disks with wavy edges.

This was exactly what we had seen in that terrible mirage, which had seemed to warn us of evil. It rose before our ignorant eyes across the unknown mountains of madness. We saw it as we first came near poor Lake's unlucky camp. Yet it came from a dead city. Such shapes on its skyline had been gone for thousands and tens of thousands of years.

Whole books could be written about the life of the Old Ones. This is true of their life under the sea, and of their life after some of them moved to land. Those in shallow water kept full use of their eyes. These were at the ends of the five main tubes on their heads. They practiced the arts of carving and writing in quite the usual way. They wrote with a pointed tool on surfaces of wax that water could not harm.

Those lower down in the ocean depths used a strange glowing creature to give them light. But they also helped their sight with special senses that we do not understand. These worked through the fine rainbow-colored hairs on their heads. In an emergency, these senses made all the Old Ones partly independent of light. Their ways of carving and writing had changed strangely as they went deeper. They used certain coatings that were apparently chemical, probably to make the work glow. The carvings could not make this clear to us.

The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming with their side arms, which were like a crinoid's. Partly they wriggled along with the lower set of tentacles, which held the pseudofeet. Sometimes they made long, sweeping rushes through the water. For this they also used two or more sets of their folding, fan-like wings.

On land they used the pseudofeet for short distances. But now and then they flew very high or very far with their wings. The crinoid arms branched into many thin tentacles. These were extremely delicate, flexible and strong. Their muscles and nerves worked together with perfect exactness. So the beings had the greatest skill in art and in all work with their hands.

The toughness of these things was almost unbelievable. Even the huge pressure at the bottom of the deepest seas seemed unable to harm them. Very few seemed to die at all, except by violence. And they had very few burial places. They buried their dead standing upright. Then they covered them with five-pointed mounds marked with writing. When the carvings showed us this, Danforth and I began to have certain thoughts. We had to stop again and rest to recover.

The beings multiplied by spores, like ferns, just as Lake had guessed. But they were very tough and lived very long lives. So they did not need to replace many of their number. For this reason they did not let many new young grow from spores. They did this only when they had new lands to settle.

The young grew up quickly. They received an education far beyond anything we can imagine. The Old Ones' intellectual and artistic life was very advanced. It produced customs and institutions that lasted for an extremely long time. I will describe them more fully in the longer scientific study that I am going to publish. These customs were a little different for those who lived in the sea and those who lived on land. But they had the same foundations and the same basic features.

Like plants, they could get food from things that were not alive. But they much preferred living food, and especially animals. Under the sea they ate sea creatures raw, but on land they cooked their food. They hunted wild animals and kept herds for meat. They killed with sharp weapons. Our expedition had noticed the strange marks of these weapons on certain fossil bones.

They could stand all ordinary temperatures wonderfully well. In their natural state they could live in water down to freezing point. But then the great cold of the Pleistocene came on, nearly a million years ago. The land dwellers had to take special measures, such as artificial heating. In the end, it seems, the deadly cold drove them back into the sea.

The legends also told of their flights through space in very early times. For these, they had taken in certain chemicals. Then they hardly needed to eat or breathe, and heat and cold hardly mattered to them. But by the time of the great cold, they had lost the method. In any case, they could not have stayed in that artificial state forever without harm.

The Old Ones did not live in pairs, and their bodies were partly like plants. So they had no natural reason for families, as mammals have. But they seemed to live together in large households. They arranged these for a comfortable use of space. They also lived with others whose minds suited their own. We guessed this from the carved pictures of the work and the pastimes of those who lived together.

When they furnished their homes, they kept everything in the center of the huge rooms. This left all the walls free for decoration. On land, they lit their homes with a device that was probably electro-chemical.

Both on land and under water they used strange tables, chairs and couches. These were shaped like tall round frames, because the Old Ones rested and slept standing upright. They folded their tentacles down when they did so. They also had racks for their books. Each book was a set of hinged surfaces covered with dots.

Their government was clearly complex and probably socialistic. But we could not be sure of this from the carvings we saw. There was a lot of trade, both inside cities and between different cities. Small, flat, five-pointed pieces with writing on them were used as money. Probably the smaller greenish soapstones that our expedition found were coins of this kind.

Their culture was mainly a city culture. But there was some farming and a great deal of raising animals. They also did mining and a little manufacturing. They traveled very often. But they rarely moved to a new home for good. The great exceptions were the huge movements to settle new lands, by which the race spread.

They used nothing to carry themselves from place to place. On land, in the air and in water, the Old Ones seemed able to move extremely fast. But their loads were pulled by working animals. Under the sea these were Shoggoths. In the later years on land they were a strange variety of primitive animals with backbones.

These animals with backbones had come about by evolution that nobody guided. So had countless other forms of life: animals and plants, in the sea, on land and in the air. They grew from life cells that the Old Ones had made. But these cells had escaped beyond the area of the Old Ones' attention. They were allowed to develop freely, because they did not come into conflict with the ruling beings. Troublesome forms, of course, were simply destroyed by mechanical means.

In some of the very last and most decadent carvings, we were interested to see a primitive mammal. It moved in a clumsy, shuffling way. The land dwellers used it sometimes for food and sometimes as a funny clown. In a vague way it already looked like an ape and like a human. There was no mistaking it. When the Old Ones built land cities, pterodactyls usually lifted the huge stone blocks of the high towers. These pterodactyls had enormous wings. They belonged to a species that fossil experts had never known before.

The Old Ones lived through many geological changes and violent movements of the earth's crust. The way they survived was almost a miracle. Few or none of their first cities seem to have lasted beyond the Archaean Age. But their civilization never stopped, and their records were always passed on.

They first arrived on the planet in the Antarctic Ocean. They probably came soon after the matter that formed the moon was torn away from the nearby South Pacific. One of the carved maps showed the whole globe under water at that time. As the ages passed, their stone cities spread farther and farther from the antarctic.

Another map shows a huge area of dry land around the south pole. Clearly some of the beings made test settlements there. But they moved their main centers to the nearest sea bottom.

Later maps show this land mass cracking and drifting. Certain parts break away from it and move north. In a striking way, these maps support the theories of continental drift. Taylor, Wegener and Joly put forward these theories not long ago.

When new land rose up in the South Pacific, huge events began. Some of the sea cities were destroyed beyond hope, but that was not the worst trouble. Another race began slowly coming down from the endless depths of space. It was a land race of beings shaped like octopi. They were probably the same as the legendary spawn of Cthulhu, from before humans existed. They started a terrible war. For a time it drove the Old Ones completely back into the sea. This was a huge blow, because their land settlements had been growing.

Later, peace was made. The new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn, and the Old Ones kept the sea and the older lands. New land cities were built. The greatest of them was in the antarctic, because this region, where they had first arrived, was sacred.

From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the center of the Old Ones' civilization. All the cities that the Cthulhu spawn had built there were wiped out.

Then, suddenly, the lands of the Pacific sank again. They took with them the terrible stone city of R'lyeh and all the octopi from space. So the Old Ones ruled the planet once more. Only one shadowy fear remained, and they did not like to speak about it.

At a somewhat later age their cities covered all the land and water areas of the globe. For this reason my coming study will make a recommendation. Some archaeologist should make careful borings with Pabodie's type of drill. He should do it in certain regions that lie far apart from each other.

Through the ages, the steady movement was from water to land. The rise of new land masses encouraged this, but the Old Ones never fully left the ocean. There was another reason for the move to land. It became harder to breed and manage the Shoggoths, and successful life in the sea depended on them.

As time went on, the art of creating new life from lifeless matter was lost. The carvings admitted this sadly. So the Old Ones had to depend on shaping forms that already existed. On land, the great reptiles proved very easy to control. But the Shoggoths of the sea were different. They reproduced by splitting in two. And by accident they gained a dangerous amount of intelligence. For a time they were a serious problem.

The Old Ones had always controlled them by hypnotic suggestion. The tough bodies of the Shoggoths could take any shape. So, under this control, the Shoggoths had shaped their own bodies into various useful temporary limbs and organs. But now they sometimes used these shaping powers on their own. Then they took various copied forms that past commands had put into them. They had, it seems, developed a half-stable brain. It had its own will, which was sometimes stubborn. This will echoed the will of the Old Ones, but did not always obey it.

The carved pictures of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and disgust. Usually they were shapeless beings made of a thick, sticky jelly. It looked like a mass of bubbles stuck together. When one took the shape of a ball, it was about fifteen feet across on average. But their shape and size were always changing. They pushed out temporary parts. Or they formed what seemed to be organs of sight, hearing and speech. In this way they copied their masters, either on their own or when they were told to.

They seem to have become especially hard to control around the middle of the Permian Age. That was perhaps one hundred and fifty million years ago. At that time the Old Ones of the sea fought a real war to bring them under control again. There were pictures of this war. They showed how the Shoggoths usually left their victims, headless and covered in slime. These pictures were still very frightening, even across all the countless ages since then.

The Old Ones used strange weapons against the rebels, weapons that broke matter apart at its smallest level. In the end they won a complete victory. After that, the carvings showed a time when armed Old Ones tamed and broke in the Shoggoths. It was like the way cowboys tamed the wild horses of the American West.

During the rebellion the Shoggoths had shown that they could live out of water. But the Old Ones did not encourage this change. The Shoggoths would hardly have been useful enough on land to be worth the trouble of managing them.

During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met new trouble. There was another invasion from outer space. This time it was by creatures that were half fungus and half crab-like animal. They were surely the same creatures that appear in certain whispered hill legends of the north. In the Himalayas they are remembered as the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men.

To fight these beings, the Old Ones tried to go out into space again. It was the first time since they had come to earth. They made all the traditional preparations. But they found that they could no longer leave the earth's atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of travel between the stars had been, the race had now lost it for good.

In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands. But they could not harm the Old Ones in the sea. Little by little, the old race began its slow retreat to its first home in the antarctic.

The pictures of the battles showed something curious. Both the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go seem to have been made of a very strange kind of matter. It was much further from the matter we know than the Old Ones' substance was. They could change their form and then put themselves together again. Their enemies could not do this. So they probably came first from even more distant depths of space.

The Old Ones were extremely tough and had strange powers of life. But apart from that, they were made of ordinary matter. They must have come first from somewhere inside the space and time that we know. But we can only guess where the other beings first came from. Even guessing makes us hold our breath. Of course, all this assumes that the stories about the enemies are not pure myth. These stories said that the enemies were not of this earth and had very strange qualities. Possibly the Old Ones invented this cosmic background to explain their occasional defeats. History and pride were clearly the most important things in their minds. And it is significant that their records did not mention many advanced and powerful races. Yet these races, with their great cultures and high morals, appear again and again in certain little-known legends.

Many of the carved maps and scenes showed, with surprising clearness, how the world changed through long geological ages. In some cases, today's science will have to be corrected. In other cases, its bold guesses are wonderfully confirmed.

As I have said, Taylor, Wegener and Joly had an idea. They said that all the continents are pieces of one original antarctic land mass. The force of the earth's turning made it crack. Then the pieces drifted apart over a lower layer that is, technically, thick and fluid. Certain things suggested this idea. One was the way the coasts of Africa and South America fit together. Another was the way the great mountain chains are rolled and pushed up. This idea now gets strong support from this strange source.

Some maps clearly showed the Carboniferous Age, a hundred million or more years ago. They showed important cracks and deep splits in the land. These would later separate Africa from the lands of Europe, Asia, the Americas and the antarctic continent. At that time all these lands were still joined. Europe was then the Valusia of ancient legend.

Other maps showed all the present continents clearly separate. The most important was one about the founding of the huge dead city around us, fifty million years ago. The latest map that we could find dates perhaps from the Pliocene Age. In it the world looked roughly as it does today. But Alaska was joined to Siberia, and North America to Europe through Greenland. And South America was joined to the antarctic continent through Graham Land.

In the Carboniferous map, the whole globe was covered with the signs of the Old Ones' great stone cities. These signs were both on the ocean floor and on the cracked land mass. But in the later maps, the slow retreat toward the antarctic became very clear.

The final Pliocene map showed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip of South America. And it showed no ocean cities north of 50 degrees South Latitude. Among the Old Ones, knowledge of the northern world and interest in it had clearly dropped to zero. The only exception was a study of coast lines. They probably made it during long exploring flights on those fan-like wings of skin.

The records often told of cities destroyed by natural causes. Mountains pushed up, continents were torn apart, and earthquakes shook the land or the sea bottom. It was curious to see that they rebuilt fewer and fewer cities as the ages went by.

The huge dead city that opened around us seemed to be the last main center of the race. It was built early in the Cretaceous Age. Before that, a huge folding of the earth's crust had destroyed an even larger city not far away.

It seemed that this general region was the most sacred place of all. The legends said that the first Old Ones had settled here, on an ancient sea bottom. We could recognize many features of this newer city in the carvings. In each direction it stretched a full hundred miles along the mountain range. That was far beyond the farthest edge of our air survey. The city was said to keep certain sacred stones from the first city on the sea bottom. These stones had been pushed up into the light after long ages, when the rock layers crumpled.

### Glossary

- **Shoggoths**: huge, shapeless creatures like bubbling jelly, made by the Old Ones as slaves; they can form eyes and other body parts when they need them.
- **Necronomicon**: a famous, frightening old book of dark magic and secret history, written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
- **Old Ones**: very old, intelligent creatures from the stars who lived on earth long before humans.
- **mirage**: an image in the air caused by light bending in cold or hot air; things far away seem to float or change shape.
- **crinoid**: a sea animal like a flower on a stalk ("sea lily"), with branching arms.
- **pseudofeet**: parts of the body that work like feet but are not real feet.
- **spores**: tiny seeds of ferns and mushrooms; the Old Ones reproduce like ferns, from tiny spores.
- **decadent**: in decline; later and of lower quality.
- **socialistic**: (of a government) shared and run by the community.
- **pterodactyls**: flying reptiles that lived in the age of the dinosaurs.
- **continental drift**: the idea that the continents slowly move and were once joined.
- **Cthulhu spawn**: octopus-shaped creatures from space connected with Cthulhu, a monster god of the myths.
- **R'lyeh**: a legendary stone city of the Cthulhu spawn that sank under the Pacific Ocean.
- **Mi-Go**: creatures from space, half fungus and half crab-like animal; in the Himalayas people call them the Abominable Snow Men.
- **Permian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Archaean, Carboniferous**: periods of the earth's history; the Archaean is the earliest, the Pleistocene is the time of the ice ages.

## VIII.

Of course, Danforth and I studied everything about the district where we were with special interest. We felt a strange, personal sense of awe. Naturally there was a huge amount of this local material.

On the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find a house built very late. Its walls had been somewhat damaged by a nearby crack in the ground. But they held decadent carvings that carried the story of the region much further than the Pliocene map. That map had given us our last general view of the world before humans. This house was the last place we examined in detail. What we found there gave us a new goal, and an urgent one.

Certainly we were in one of the strangest, most unnatural and most terrible corners of the whole earth. Of all the lands that exist, it was by far the oldest. We grew more and more sure of one thing. This terrible high land must really be the plateau of Leng from the old stories. It was a place of nightmares. Even the mad author of the *Necronomicon* did not like to talk about it.

The great mountain chain was extremely long. It started as a low range at Luitpold Land on the coast of the Weddell Sea. From there it crossed almost the whole continent. The really high part stretched in a great curve. It ran from about Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70°, East Longitude 115°. The inside of the curve faced our camp. Its end toward the sea was in the region of that long, ice-locked coast. Wilkes and Mawson had seen the hills of that coast at the antarctic circle.

Yet nature had made something even bigger and more terrible, and it seemed uncomfortably close. I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas. But the carvings do not allow me to say that they are the highest on earth. That dark honor surely belongs to something else. Half the carvings did not want to show it at all. Others showed it with clear disgust and fear.

It seems that one part of the ancient land had come to be avoided. It was felt to be evil in a vague, nameless way. It was the first part that ever rose from the waters. This happened after the earth had thrown off the moon and the Old Ones had come down from the stars. Cities built there had fallen into ruin too early. They had been found suddenly empty.

Then the first great folding of the earth's crust shook the region in the Comanchean Age. A terrible line of peaks suddenly shot up amid the most awful noise and chaos. And so the earth got her highest and most terrible mountains.

If the scale of the carvings was correct, these hated things must have been far over forty thousand feet high. They were much, much bigger than even the shocking mountains of madness that we had crossed. They stretched, it seemed, from about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 100°. That was less than three hundred miles from the dead city. So we would have seen their feared peaks in the dim western distance, but for that faint, shining haze. Their northern end should also be visible from the long coast line at Queen Mary Land, on the antarctic circle.

In the decadent days, some of the Old Ones had prayed to those mountains in strange ways. But none of them ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyond. No human eye had ever seen them. As I studied the feelings shown in the carvings, I prayed that none ever would.

There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them, in Queen Mary Land and Kaiser Wilhelm Land. I thank Heaven that no one has been able to land there and climb those hills. I am not as doubtful about old tales and fears as I used to be. The sculptor lived before there were humans, and he had a certain idea. I do not laugh at it now. He showed lightning that now and then stopped meaningfully at each of the dark peaks. And he showed a strange glow that shone from one of those terrible summits all through the long polar night. The old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste may have a very real and terrible meaning.

But the land close by was hardly less strange, even if it was less evil in that nameless way. Soon after the city was founded, the great mountain range became the home of the main temples. Many carvings showed the strange, fantastic towers that had once risen into the sky there. Now we saw only the cubes and ramparts that clung so strangely to the slopes.

Over the ages the caves had appeared, and the Old Ones had made them into parts of the temples. In still later times, ground water hollowed out all the limestone in the region. So the mountains, the foothills and the plains below them became a real network of connected caves and passages. Many vivid carvings told of explorations deep underground. They told of the final discovery of the black, sunless sea hidden deep inside the earth.

This huge, dark gulf had surely been worn away by the great river. The river flowed down from the nameless, horrible mountains in the west. Once it had turned at the base of the Old Ones' range. Then it had flowed beside that chain into the Indian Ocean, between Budd Land and Totten Land on Wilkes's coast. Little by little it had eaten away the limestone at the base of the hills where it turned. At last its currents reached the caves of the ground waters. Then they joined with them in digging a deeper abyss.

In the end all its water poured into the hollow hills, and the old bed toward the ocean became dry. Much of the later city, as we found it now, had been built over that old river bed. The Old Ones understood what had happened. And they used their sense of art, which was always sharp. Where the great stream began its fall into endless darkness, there were headlands in the foothills. The Old Ones had carved these into richly decorated pylons.

This river had once been crossed by dozens of fine stone bridges. Clearly it was the dry river bed that we had seen from the plane. Its position in different carvings of the city helped us to find our way. We could see the place as it had been at different stages of its long, dead history. So we were able to draw a quick but careful map of the main features. It showed squares, important buildings and so on, to guide us in further exploring.

Soon we could picture the whole amazing city in our minds. We saw it as it was a million, ten million or fifty million years ago. The carvings told us exactly how everything had looked. They showed the buildings, the mountains, the squares and the suburbs. They showed the landscape around it and the rich plants of the Tertiary period.

It must have had a wonderful and mysterious beauty. As I thought of it, I almost forgot the cold, heavy, evil feeling that had been pressing on me. The city's inhuman age had caused it, and its huge size. So had its deadness, its distance from everything, and its icy half-light. All this had choked my spirit and weighed it down.

Yet certain carvings showed that the people of that city had also known the grip of terror. One dark scene appeared again and again. In it the Old Ones were shown pulling back in fear from some object. The object was never allowed to appear in the picture. It had been found in the great river. The carvings showed that it had been washed down from those horrible mountains in the west. It had come through waving cycad forests hung with vines.

We found the first signs of the final disaster only in that one late house with the decadent carvings. It was this disaster that made the Old Ones leave the city. Surely there must have been many carvings of the same age in other places. In that hard and uncertain time, the Old Ones had less energy and fewer hopes. But even so, there must have been others. In fact, very certain proof of others came to us soon afterward. But this was the first and only set that we came upon directly.

We meant to look further later. But as I have said, the situation at that moment gave us another goal. Even so, there would have been a limit. In the end the Old Ones lost all hope of a long future in the place. After that, they must have stopped decorating the walls completely. The final blow, of course, was the coming of the great cold. It once held most of the earth in its power. It has never left the unlucky poles. At the other end of the world, it ended the legendary lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.

It is hard to say in exact years when this change began in the antarctic. Today we put the start of the general ice ages about five hundred thousand years before the present. But at the poles the terrible cold must have begun much earlier. All estimates of numbers are partly guesswork. But it is quite likely that the decadent carvings were made much less than a million years ago. And the city was probably completely empty long before the usual start of the Pleistocene. If we count for the earth's whole surface, that start was five hundred thousand years ago.

In the decadent carvings there were signs that plants were thinner everywhere. The Old Ones also lived less in the country. Heating devices were shown in the houses. Winter travelers were shown wrapped up in protective cloth. Then we saw a series of cartouches. In these late carvings the continuous bands were often broken. The cartouches showed more and more of the Old Ones moving to the nearest warmer places of safety. Some fled to cities under the sea off the far-away coast. Others climbed down through networks of limestone caves in the hollow hills. They went down to the nearby black abyss of underground waters.

In the end, it seems, the nearby abyss received the most settlers. No doubt this was partly because of the old sacredness of this special region. But the main reason may have been the chances it offered. They could go on using the great temples in the mountains, which were full of holes like a honeycomb. And they could keep the huge land city as a summer home. It could also be a base for reaching various mines.

The Old Ones linked the old and new homes better by improving the routes between them. They made the slopes easier and the paths better. They also cut many direct tunnels from the ancient city down to the black abyss. These tunnels pointed sharply downward. We carefully drew their mouths on the guide map we were making, using our best estimates.

Clearly at least two of these tunnels were within a reasonable exploring distance of where we were. Both were on the edge of the city nearest the mountains. One was less than a quarter of a mile toward the old river course. The other was perhaps twice that distance in the opposite direction.

The abyss, it seems, had sloping shores of dry land in certain places. But the Old Ones built their new city under water. No doubt this was because the warmth there was more certain to stay even. The hidden sea seems to have been very deep. So the earth's inner heat could keep it fit to live in for an unlimited time.

The beings seem to have had no trouble getting used to living under water part of the time. Later, of course, they lived there all the time. They had never let their gills grow weak from lack of use.

Many carvings showed that they had always made frequent visits to their relatives under the sea in other places. They also used to bathe at the deep bottom of their great river. The darkness inside the earth could not have stopped them either. They were a race used to the long antarctic nights.

These latest carvings were clearly decadent in style. But where they told of building the new city in the cave sea, they were truly grand and heroic. The Old Ones went about it scientifically. They cut rocks that water could not dissolve from the heart of the hollow mountains. And they brought expert workers from the nearest city under the sea. These workers built it by the best methods.

They brought everything needed to start the new project. They brought Shoggoth tissue to breed stone lifters, and later working animals, for the cave city. They also brought other living jelly to shape into glowing creatures for light.

At last a great city rose on the bottom of that black sea. Its buildings were much like those of the city above. Its workmanship showed fairly little decadence. This was because building needs exact mathematics.

The newly bred Shoggoths grew to huge size and unusual intelligence. The carvings showed them taking and carrying out orders wonderfully fast. They seemed to talk with the Old Ones by copying their voices. This was a kind of musical piping over a wide range, if poor Lake's dissection had shown it correctly. They also seemed to work more from spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestion, as in earlier times.

However, they were kept under excellent control. The glowing creatures gave very good light. No doubt they made up for the loss of the polar auroras in the night of the outer world.

The Old Ones still practiced art and decoration, though of course with a certain decadence. They seemed to see this decline themselves. In many cases they did what Constantine the Great would do much later. They moved especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their land city. The emperor did the same in a similar age of decline. He took the finest art from Greece and Asia for his new Byzantine capital. He wanted it to have greater beauty than its own people could create. The Old Ones did not move more carved blocks than this. No doubt this was because they did not fully leave the land city at first.

Then they did leave it completely. That surely happened before the polar Pleistocene was far along. By then the Old Ones had perhaps become content with their decadent art. Or they no longer saw that the older carvings were better. In any case, the ruins around us had been silent for ages. They had certainly not been stripped of their carvings on a large scale. But all the best separate statues had been taken away, like other things that could be moved.

As I have said, the decadent cartouches and wall bands that told this story were the latest we could find. Our search had been limited. They left us with a picture of the Old Ones going back and forth. They lived in the land city in summer and in the sea-cave city in winter. Sometimes they traded with the cities on the sea bottom off the antarctic coast.

By this time the Old Ones must have known that the land city was finally doomed. The carvings showed many signs that the cold was slowly and cruelly moving in. Plants were dying out. The terrible winter snows no longer melted completely, even in midsummer.

Almost all the reptiles they kept as livestock were dead. The mammals were not doing well either. To keep the upper world working, the Old Ones had to adapt some Shoggoths to life on land. These shapeless Shoggoths could stand the cold surprisingly well. The Old Ones had not wanted to do this before. The great river was now without life. The upper sea had lost most of its creatures, except the seals and whales. All the birds had flown away, except the great, odd-looking penguins.

What happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new sea-cave city lasted? Was it still down there, a dead body of stone in endless blackness? Had the underground waters frozen at last? What fate had come to the cities on the ocean bottom in the outer world? Had any of the Old Ones moved north ahead of the creeping ice? Geology today shows no sign that they were there. Had the terrible Mi-Go still been a danger in the outer lands of the north? Could anyone be sure what might still live, even today, in earth's deepest waters? Those dark depths have never been explored.

Those things had apparently been able to stand any amount of pressure. And men of the sea have sometimes fished up strange objects. Then there are the wild and mysterious scars on antarctic seals. Borchgrevingk noticed them a generation ago. Has the killer-whale theory really explained them?

The specimens that poor Lake found had no part in these guesses. Their place in the rock layers proved that they had lived very early in the land city's history. Judging by where they lay, they were certainly not less than thirty million years old. We thought about this. In their day the sea-cave city did not exist yet. In fact, even the cave itself did not exist.

They would have remembered an older scene. There were rich Tertiary plants everywhere. Around them was a younger land city, full of flourishing arts. And a great river swept north along the base of the mighty mountains, toward a far-away tropical ocean.

And yet we could not stop thinking about these specimens. We thought especially about the eight perfect ones missing from Lake's terribly wrecked camp. There was something unnatural about that whole business. There were the strange things that we had tried so hard to blame on somebody's madness. There were those terrible graves. There was the amount *and nature* of the missing material. There was Gedney. There was the unearthly toughness of those ancient monsters. And the carvings now showed the race's strange life powers——Danforth and I had seen much in the last few hours. We were ready to believe many terrible and unbelievable secrets of early nature, and to keep silent about them.

### Glossary

- **Leng**: an evil high plateau in old myths, usually placed in Central Asia.
- **Necronomicon**: a famous, frightening old book of dark magic and secret history, written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
- **Kadath in the Cold Waste**: a mysterious place in old myths, in a cold empty land, home of strange gods.
- **Pnakotic**: from the Pnakotic Manuscripts: very old written texts, older than humans perhaps, with secret knowledge about the earth's past.
- **Comanchean Age**: an old American name for the early and middle Cretaceous period, in the age of the dinosaurs.
- **ramparts**: thick defensive walls.
- **pylons**: huge gate towers or pillars at an entrance.
- **cycad**: a very old kind of tropical plant that looks like a small palm tree.
- **cartouches**: framed, smooth panels with writing (here the dot groups).
- **abyss**: a very deep hole or space that seems to have no bottom.
- **Shoggoth**: a huge, shapeless creature like bubbling jelly, made by the Old Ones as a slave; it can form eyes and other body parts when it needs them.
- **auroras**: colored lights that move across the night sky near the poles.
- **Lomar and Hyperborea**: legendary lands in the far north, destroyed by the cold.
- **Mi-Go**: creatures from space, half fungus and half crab-like animal; in the Himalayas people call them the Abominable Snow Men.
- **Tertiary, Pliocene, Pleistocene**: periods of the earth's history after the dinosaurs; the Pleistocene is the time of the ice ages.

## IX.

I have said that our study of the decadent carvings changed our plans for the moment. Our new aim, of course, was the tunnels cut down to the black world inside the earth. We had not known about them before. But now we wanted very much to find them and go through them.

From the clear scale of the carvings, we worked something out. A steep walk of about a mile down either of the nearby tunnels would bring us to the great abyss. There, at its edge, high and dizzy cliffs went down where no sun ever shone. Paths on their sides, made better by the Old Ones, led down to the rocky shore of the hidden ocean in the dark. Once we knew about this wonderful gulf, we could not resist the wish to see it with our own eyes. But we understood that we must start at once. Otherwise we could not include it in this trip.

It was now eight p.m. We did not have enough spare batteries to keep our torches burning forever. We had done much of our studying and copying below the level of the ice. So our batteries had already been used for at least five hours, almost without a break. They had a special dry-cell formula. Even so, they would clearly last only about four more hours. But we could keep one torch switched off, except in very interesting or difficult places. Then we might safely stretch our light a little beyond that.

It would be dangerous to be without light in these Cyclopean underground passages. So, to make the trip to the abyss, we had to stop reading the wall carvings. Of course, we planned to come back for days, perhaps weeks, of careful study and photography. Our curiosity had long ago become stronger than our horror. But just now we had to hurry.

Our supply of paper for the trail was far from unlimited. We did not want to give up spare notebooks or sketching paper to add to it. But we did let one large notebook go. If the worst happened, we could mark our way by chipping the rock. And even if we really lost our way, we could still reach full daylight in the end. We would only need enough time to try one passage after another. So, at last, we set off eagerly toward the nearest tunnel, in the direction the map showed.

We had made our map from the carvings. According to them, the tunnel mouth we wanted could not be much more than a quarter of a mile away. Between us and it, the map showed solid-looking buildings. Probably we could still get through them at a level below the ice. The opening itself would be in the basement of a huge five-pointed building. It would be in the corner nearest the foothills. The building was clearly a public one, and perhaps it had been used for ceremonies. We tried to remember it from our flight over the ruins.

But we could not remember any such building. So we decided that its upper parts must be badly damaged. Or perhaps it had been completely broken up by a crack in the ice that we had noticed. In that case the tunnel would probably be blocked. Then we would have to try the next nearest one, less than a mile to the north.

The old river course lay between us and the tunnels farther south. So we could not try any of them on this trip. And if both nearby tunnels were blocked, our batteries might not be enough for the next one to the north. That one lay about a mile beyond our second choice.

We made our way through the dim maze with the help of map and compass. We went through rooms and corridors in every state, from ruin to perfect condition. We climbed up ramps, crossed upper floors and bridges, and climbed down again. We met blocked doorways and piles of broken stone. Now and then we hurried along stretches that were well preserved and strangely clean. Sometimes we took a wrong way and had to go back. Then we picked up the useless paper trail we had left. And once in a while we came to the bottom of an open shaft. Daylight poured or trickled down through it. All along our way, the carved walls tempted us again and again.

At last we had crawled very close to the place where we had calculated the tunnel mouth to be. We had crossed a bridge on the second floor to what was clearly the tip of a pointed wall. Then we had gone down into a ruined corridor. Its walls were especially rich in late, decadent carvings, full of detail. They seemed to show religious ceremonies. There, at about eight thirty p.m., Danforth's sharp young nose gave us the first sign of something unusual.

If we had had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned earlier. At first we could not say exactly what was wrong with the air, which had been so pure before. But after a few seconds our memories gave us the answer, all too clearly. Let me try to say it plainly, without turning away from it. There was a smell. And that smell was faint, but it was surely like another smell we knew. It was the one that had made us sick when we opened the mad grave. That was the grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected.

Of course, it was not as clear at the time as it sounds now. There were several possible explanations, and we whispered a lot without deciding anything. Most important of all, we did not go back without looking further. We had come this far. We did not want to be stopped by anything less than certain disaster.

In any case, what we must have suspected was much too wild to believe. Such things did not happen in any normal world. It was probably pure instinct, without reason, that made us dim our single torch. We were no longer tempted by the decadent, evil-looking carvings. They grinned at us in a threatening way from the walls, which seemed to press in on us. The same instinct made us move carefully on tiptoe. We crawled over the floor and the heaps of broken stone, which grew thicker and thicker.

Danforth's eyes, as well as his nose, were better than mine. He was also the first to notice something strange about the broken stone. By then we had passed many half-blocked arches that led to rooms and corridors on the ground level. The stone on the floor did not look right for a place left empty for countless thousands of years. We carefully turned on more light. Then we saw that a kind of path seemed to have been made through it not long ago. The stones were too uneven to keep clear marks. But in the smoother places there were signs that heavy things had been dragged. Once we thought we saw two parallel tracks, as if from runners. This made us stop again.

During that stop we both noticed the other smell ahead, at the same moment this time. In a strange way, it was both less terrible and more terrible. In itself it was less terrible. But in this place, after all we knew, it was terribly frightening—unless, of course, Gedney—— For the smell was the plain, familiar smell of common petrol—everyday gasoline.

What drove us on after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We knew now that some terrible part of the camp horror must have crawled into this dark grave of the ages. So we could no longer doubt that nameless things lay just ahead. They were happening now, or at least very recently. Yet in the end we let something drive us on. It was pure burning curiosity—or fear—or a kind of self-hypnosis. Or it was vague thoughts that we were responsible for Gedney—or who knows what.

Danforth whispered again about the print he thought he had seen at the corner of the alley, in the ruins above. He also whispered about the faint musical piping. He thought he had half heard it soon afterward, from unknown depths below. After Lake's dissection report, that sound might mean a great deal. But it was also very like the echoes of the wind in the cave mouths of the peaks.

I, in my turn, whispered about how we had found the camp. I spoke of what had disappeared from it. And I spoke of the madness of a lone survivor, who might have planned the unthinkable. He might have made a wild trip across the terrible mountains. He might have gone down into this unknown, ancient stonework——

But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite. We had turned off all light while we stood still. Then we half noticed that a very faint daylight came down from far above. It kept the darkness from being complete.

We began to move forward again, almost without thinking. We guided ourselves by short flashes from our torch. We could not forget how the broken stone had been disturbed. And the smell of gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes and got in the way of our feet. Very soon we saw that the way forward was about to end. Our gloomy guess about the crack we had seen from the air had been all too right. Our search for the tunnel had led nowhere. We would not even be able to reach the basement where the opening to the abyss was.

Our torch flashed over the strangely carved walls of the blocked corridor where we stood. It showed several doorways, some more blocked than others. From one of them the smell of gasoline came especially strongly. There it completely covered the other faint smell. We looked more carefully. Then we saw, without any doubt, that someone had cleared some broken stone from that doorway. It was not much, and it was not long ago. Whatever the hidden horror was, we believed the direct way to it was now clear. I do not think anyone will be surprised that we waited quite a long time before we moved again.

And yet, when we finally went in through that black arch, at first we were almost disappointed. It was a carved crypt, a perfect cube about twenty feet on each side. Its floor was covered with broken stone. But there was no recent object in it big enough to see at once. So, by instinct, we looked for another doorway beyond. We found none.

A moment later, however, Danforth's sharp eyes found a place where the stone on the floor had been disturbed. We turned both torches on at full strength. What we saw in that light was really simple and small. Still, I do not like to tell of it, because of what it meant.

Someone had roughly leveled the broken stone. Several small objects lay carelessly scattered on it. At one corner a lot of gasoline must have been spilled, and not long ago. It still left a strong smell, even in the thin air at this great height. In other words, it could only be a kind of camp. It was a camp made by searching beings. Like us, they had been turned back because the way to the abyss was blocked. They had not expected it either.

Let me be plain. The scattered objects had all come from Lake's camp. There were tin cans, opened in the same strange way as those we had seen at that ruined place. There were many used matches. There were three illustrated books, all more or less strangely smudged. There was an empty ink bottle with its box, which had pictures and instructions on it. There was a broken fountain pen, and some oddly cut pieces of fur and tent cloth. There was a used electric battery with its sheet of directions. There was a leaflet that came with our type of tent heater. And there were a few crumpled papers.

It was all bad enough. But then we smoothed out the papers and looked at them. We felt we had come to the worst. At the camp we had found some papers with strange ink blots on them, and these might have prepared us. Yet seeing this down here was almost too much to bear. We were in the vaults of a nightmare city, older than mankind.

A mad Gedney might have drawn the groups of dots, copying those on the greenish soapstones. The dots on those mad five-pointed grave mounds might have been made in the same way. He might even have made rough, hasty sketches, some more accurate than others. They showed the nearby parts of the city. They traced a way to this five-pointed building and its tunnel mouth. The way started from a place drawn as a circle, outside the route we had taken. We knew this place. In the carvings it was a great round tower. From the plane we had seen it as a huge round gulf.

He might, I repeat, have made such sketches. Those in front of us had clearly been made, just as ours had, from late carvings. These carvings were somewhere in the maze under the ice. But they were not the ones that we had seen and used. And there was one thing a clumsy man with no eye for art could never have done. He could never have drawn those sketches in such a strange and sure way. They were drawn fast and carelessly. Even so, they were perhaps better than any of the decadent carvings they were copied from. It was the typical, unmistakable style of the Old Ones themselves, from the best days of the dead city.

Some people will say that Danforth and I were completely mad not to run for our lives after that. Our conclusions were now quite fixed, wild as they were. Those who have read my story this far know what they were. I need not even say them. Perhaps we were mad—for have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can see something of the same spirit in other men, though in a weaker form. I mean the men who follow deadly animals through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits. We were half frozen with terror. Yet a burning flame of awe and curiosity rose inside us, and in the end it won.

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. By this time they would have found the other nearby entrance to the abyss. They would have gone in, toward whatever night-black pieces of the past might wait for them in the deepest gulf. They had never seen that deepest gulf. Or if that entrance was blocked too, they would have gone on to the north to look for another. They could, we remembered, manage partly without light.

When I look back, I can hardly remember what exact form our new feelings took. I cannot say just what new aim made us so tense and expectant. We certainly did not mean to face what we feared. Yet I will not deny that we may have had a hidden wish, deep inside us. Perhaps we wished to watch certain things from some hidden place.

We had probably not given up our wish to see the abyss itself. But now a new goal came in between. It was the great round place shown on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had known it at once. In the carvings it was a huge round tower. From above it looked only like an enormous round hole.

Something in the way it was drawn impressed us, even in these hasty sketches. It made us think that its levels under the ice must still be especially important. Perhaps it held wonders of building that we had not yet seen. According to the carvings that showed it, it was certainly unbelievably old. In fact, it was among the first buildings in the city. If its carvings still existed, they must be very important. Also, it might be a good way up to the world above. It would be shorter than the route we were marking so carefully. And it was probably the way by which those others had come down.

In any case, this is what we did. We studied the terrible sketches, which matched our own perfectly. Then we started back along the route they showed, toward the round place. Our nameless forerunners must have gone along that route twice before us. The other nearby gate to the abyss would lie beyond it. I need not describe our journey. We kept leaving a careful, thin trail of paper. The journey was just like the one that had brought us to the dead end. But this time it kept closer to the ground level, and it even went down to corridors in the basements.

Every now and then we saw disturbing marks in the broken stone and rubbish under our feet. After we had left the area of the gasoline smell, we noticed that other smell again. It came faintly, now and then. It was more horrible, and it never quite went away. Our way had now branched off from our earlier route. Sometimes we swept the light of our single torch quickly and secretly along the walls. Almost every time we saw carvings. They were nearly everywhere. Carving seems to have been the main art of the Old Ones.

At about nine-thirty p.m. we were going along a vaulted corridor. There was more and more ice on its floor, which seemed to be a little below the ground level. Its roof grew lower as we went on. Then we began to see strong daylight ahead and could turn off our torch. It seemed that we were coming to the huge round place. And we could not be very far from the open air above.

The corridor ended in an arch. It was surprisingly low for these ruins of giant stones. But we could see a lot through it, even before we came out. Beyond it lay an enormous round space, fully two hundred feet across. It was covered with broken stone. Around it were many blocked archways, like the one we were about to pass through. Where there was room, the walls were boldly carved with a spiral band of heroic size. Weather had damaged it badly, because the place was open to the sky. Even so, its art was far more splendid than anything we had seen before. The floor was covered with rubble and a thick layer of ice. We guessed that the real bottom lay much deeper.

But the main thing in the place was a gigantic stone ramp. It made a sharp turn outward into the open floor, to avoid the archways. Then it wound in a spiral up the huge round wall. Ramps like this once climbed around the outside of the great towers, or zikkurats, of ancient Babylon. This one was the same, but on the inside. We had not noticed it from the air for two reasons. We had flown past very fast. And from above, the ramp had seemed to be part of the tower's inner wall. That was why we had looked for another way down below the ice.

Pabodie might have been able to say how it was held in place. Danforth and I could only stare and wonder. Here and there we saw strong stone supports and pillars. But they did not seem strong enough for the job they did. The ramp was very well preserved, right up to the present top of the tower. This was remarkable, since it was open to the weather. And its shelter had done much to protect the strange, disturbing carvings of cosmic scenes on the walls.

We stepped out into the half daylight at the bottom of this huge cylinder, and we felt great awe. The cylinder was fifty million years old. Without doubt, it was the most ancient building we had ever seen. Its sides, with the ramp winding around them, rose dizzily to a height of fully sixty feet.

We remembered our flight, and we understood what this meant. The ice outside must be about forty feet deep. The deep hole we had seen from the plane had been at the top of a mound of broken stone. That mound was about twenty feet high. For three quarters of its edge, it was partly sheltered by the heavy curved walls of a line of higher ruins. According to the carvings, the tower had once stood in the center of a huge round plaza. It had been perhaps five hundred or six hundred feet high. Near the top it had layers of flat, round disks. A row of thin, needle-like spires ran around its upper edge.

Most of the stone had clearly fallen outward, not inward. This was lucky. Otherwise the ramp might have been smashed and the whole inside filled up. As it was, the ramp was badly battered. And all the archways seemed to have been half cleared of the rubble that blocked them.

It took us only a moment to decide two things. This was indeed the way by which those others had come down. And it would be the sensible way for us to climb up, even though we had left a long trail of paper elsewhere. The mouth of the tower was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane than the great terraced building we had entered. And any further exploring below the ice on this trip would be in this general area.

It is strange, but we were still thinking about later trips—even after all we had seen and guessed. Then, as we picked our way carefully over the broken stone of the great floor, we saw something. For the time, it pushed every other thought out of our minds.

It was a neat group of three sledges, standing close together. They were in the farther corner of the lowest curve of the ramp, where it stood out into the floor. Until now this corner had been hidden from us. There they were—the three sledges missing from Lake's camp. They were shaken and damaged by hard use. They must have been dragged by force over long stretches of bare stone and rubble, with no snow. And they must often have been carried by hand over places where no one could travel.

They had been packed and strapped carefully and intelligently. They held things that we knew only too well. There was the gasoline stove, cans of fuel, cases of instruments and tins of food. There were tarpaulins clearly bulging with books. Some other tarpaulins bulged with things that were harder to guess. Everything had come from Lake's equipment.

After what we had found in that other room, we were partly prepared for this. The really great shock came when we stepped over and opened one tarpaulin. Its shape had disturbed us in a strange way. It seems that others besides Lake had been interested in collecting typical specimens. For there were two here. Both were frozen stiff and perfectly preserved. Sticking plaster had been put over some wounds around the neck. They had been wrapped with care to stop any more damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog.

### Glossary

- **abyss**: a very deep hole or space that seems to have no bottom.
- **gulf**: a very deep hole or space; another word for an abyss.
- **Old Ones**: very old, intelligent creatures from the stars who lived on earth long before humans.
- **decadent**: in decline; later and of lower quality.
- **Cyclopean**: made of enormous stone blocks, as if built by giants.
- **crypt**: an underground room.
- **dissected**: cut open to study the inside of the body.
- **soapstone**: soft greenish stone, smooth like soap.
- **zikkurats**: stepped towers of ancient Babylon.
- **tarpaulins**: large pieces of strong, waterproof cloth used to cover things.
- **sledges**: sleds pulled by dogs; their "runners" are the long narrow pieces they slide on.
- **petrol**: another word for gasoline.

## X.

Many people will probably think we were heartless as well as mad. We were thinking about the northern tunnel and the abyss so soon after our grim discovery. I cannot say that we would have gone back to such thoughts at once. But something happened that broke in on us. It started a whole new line of guesses.

We had put the tarpaulin back over poor Gedney. We were standing there, silent and confused, when at last we became aware of sounds. They were the first sounds we had heard since we came down from the open air. Up there the mountain wind had whined faintly from its strange heights. These sounds were well known and ordinary. Yet here, in this far-off world of death, they were more unexpected and upsetting than any strange or magical tones. They shook all our ideas about the order of the universe.

Suppose we had heard some trace of that strange musical piping over a wide range. Lake's dissection report had made us expect it from those others. In fact, our tired, excited minds had heard it in every howl of the wind since we came upon the camp horror. Such a sound would have fitted, in a hellish way, with the region around us, dead for ages. A voice from other ages belongs in a graveyard of other ages.

As it was, however, the noise broke all our deepest beliefs. Without saying it, we had accepted that the inner antarctic was a waste. We had thought it was completely and forever empty of every trace of normal life.

What we heard was not the strange call of some buried, unholy thing from the ancient earth. It was not a monstrous cry from a very tough ancient creature. The polar sun had not reached it for ages, but had woken it at last. Instead, it was something so normal that it seemed to mock us. We knew it so well from our days at sea off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound. We trembled to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief—it was simply the loud, harsh squawking of a penguin.

The muffled sound came from places under the ice, almost opposite the corridor we had come from. These places clearly lay in the direction of that other tunnel to the huge abyss. On the surface, this whole world had been without life for ages. So a living water bird in that direction could mean only one thing. Our first thought was to make sure the sound was real. It was, indeed, repeated. At times it seemed to come from more than one throat.

To find where it came from, we went through an archway. Much broken stone had been cleared away from it. When we left the daylight behind, we started our paper trail again. We had taken more paper from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledges. We did it with a strange feeling of disgust.

Then the icy floor gave way to loose rubble. There we clearly saw some strange dragging tracks. And once Danforth found a clear print. It would be only too unnecessary to describe it. The penguin cries led us exactly the way our map and compass showed for the more northern tunnel mouth. We were glad to find that a way on the ground and basement levels, without any bridges, seemed to be open.

According to the map, the tunnel should start from the basement of a large pyramid-shaped building. We seemed to remember it vaguely from our flight. It had looked remarkably well preserved. Along our path the single torch showed the usual mass of carvings. But we did not stop to look at any of them.

Suddenly a bulky white shape rose up ahead of us. We flashed on the second torch. It is strange how completely this new search had turned our minds from our earlier fears. We had forgotten what might be hiding near. Those other ones had left their supplies in the great round place. So they must have planned to return after their scouting trip toward the abyss, or into it. Yet we had now dropped all care about them. It was as if they had never existed.

This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high. Yet we seemed to know at once that it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark. And according to the carvings, they moved quickly and surely on land. They did so in spite of their strange tentacles, which came from the sea. But it would be useless to say that the white thing did not frighten us deeply. For a moment we were gripped by a primitive dread. It was almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears about those others.

Then came a sudden letdown. The white shape moved sideways into a side archway on our left. There it joined two others of its kind, which had called it with harsh cries. For it was only a penguin. But it was of a huge, unknown species, larger than the biggest king penguins we know. And it was strange and frightening, because it was albino and almost without eyes.

We followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on the group of three. They paid no attention to us. We saw that they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown giant species.

Their size reminded us of some of the ancient penguins shown in the Old Ones' carvings. It did not take us long to decide that they came from the same family line. Surely they had survived by moving to some warmer region deep inside the earth. Its endless blackness had taken away their color. It had made their eyes shrink to useless slits.

We could not doubt for a moment that they now lived in the huge abyss we were looking for. So the gulf was still warm, and creatures could still live there. This proof filled us with strange and disturbing thoughts.

We also wondered what had made these three birds come out of their usual home. The great dead city was so ruined and silent. Clearly it had never been a rookery where they came every season. And the three birds clearly did not care about us at all. So it seemed odd that any passing group of those others should have frightened them.

Was it possible that those others had attacked them, or tried to get more meat? The dogs had hated that sharp smell. But we doubted that it would cause the same dislike in these penguins. Their ancestors had clearly lived on very good terms with the Old Ones. This friendship must have lasted in the abyss below, as long as any of the Old Ones were left.

For a moment the old spirit of pure science flared up in us. We were sorry we could not photograph these unusual creatures. But soon we left them to their squawking and pushed on toward the abyss. We knew now for certain that the way to it was open. Penguin tracks here and there showed us its exact direction.

Not long afterward we went down a steep slope in a long, low corridor. It had no doors and, strangely, no carvings. It made us believe we were coming to the tunnel mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins.

Then the corridor ended in an enormous open space, and we gasped without meaning to. It was a perfect half-sphere, like a huge bowl turned upside down. It was clearly deep underground. It was fully a hundred feet across and fifty feet high. Low archways opened all around its edge except in one place. There a black, arched opening, like the mouth of a cave, broke the even shape of the dome. It rose to a height of nearly fifteen feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss.

The curved roof of this huge half-sphere was carved to look like the sky of the earliest times. The carving was impressive, though decadent. A few albino penguins waddled about. They did not belong there, but they did not care and could not see. The black tunnel went on and on, sloping steeply down. Its opening had strangely carved sides and a carved stone beam across the top.

From that mysterious mouth, we thought, came a current of slightly warmer air. Perhaps there was even a hint of vapor. We wondered what living things, other than penguins, might be hidden below. There was the endless empty space down there. There were also the honeycombs of passages nearby, under the land and the giant mountains.

We also wondered about the smoke on the mountaintops that poor Lake had thought he saw at first. And we ourselves had seen a strange haze around the peak with a rampart on top. Perhaps such vapor caused both. It might rise through winding channels from the unknown depths near the center of the earth.

We entered the tunnel. At least at the start, it measured about fifteen feet each way. Its sides, floor and arched roof were made of the usual huge stone blocks. Here and there the sides had cartouches with ordinary designs in a later, decadent style. All the building and carving were wonderfully well preserved.

The floor was quite clear, except for a little loose rubble. In it were penguin tracks going out and the tracks of those others going in. The farther we went, the warmer it became. Soon we were unbuttoning our heavy clothes. We wondered whether there was real volcanic activity below. And we wondered whether the waters of that sunless sea were hot.

After a short distance the stone blocks gave way to solid rock. But the tunnel kept the same size and the same carved, regular look. Sometimes the slope became so steep that grooves had been cut in the floor.

Several times we saw the mouths of small side passages that were not on our maps. None of them made our way back harder to find. And we were glad of all of them as possible hiding places. We might meet unwelcome beings on their way back from the abyss.

The nameless scent of such beings was very clear now. No doubt it was madly dangerous to go into that tunnel, knowing what we knew. But in some people the pull of the unknown is stronger than most would think. In fact, it was just such a pull that had brought us to this strange polar waste in the first place.

We saw several penguins as we went along. We tried to guess how far we would have to go. The carvings had made us expect a steep walk of about a mile down to the abyss. But our earlier wanderings had shown us that we could not fully trust their scale.

After about a quarter of a mile, the nameless scent became much stronger. We kept a very careful watch on the side openings we passed. There was no vapor to be seen, as there had been at the mouth. No doubt this was because there was no cooler air to show it. The temperature was rising fast. We were not surprised to come upon a careless heap of things we knew, and they made us shiver. It was made of furs and tent cloths from Lake's camp. We did not stop to study the strange shapes into which the cloth had been cut.

A little beyond this point, the side passages became clearly larger and more frequent. We decided that we must now have reached the area under the higher foothills. It was full of passages, like a honeycomb.

The nameless scent was now strangely mixed with another smell, almost as bad. We could not guess what it was. But we thought of rotting living things, and perhaps unknown fungi under the ground.

Then the tunnel suddenly opened out, and we were startled. The carvings had not prepared us for this. The tunnel grew wider and higher and became a tall oval cavern. It looked natural and had a level floor. It was about seventy-five feet long and fifty wide. Many huge side passages led away from it into mysterious darkness.

The cavern looked natural. But we examined it with both torches, and it seemed to have been made on purpose. Several walls had been broken down between hollows that lay next to each other. The walls were rough, and the high, arched roof was thick with stalactites. But the solid rock floor had been smoothed. It was free of all broken stone, rubble and even dust, to a degree that was truly not normal.

This was true of the floors of all the great passages that led off from it, except for the one we had come through. It was so unusual that it puzzled us, but we could not explain it.

The strange new odor had joined the nameless scent. Here it was extremely sharp. It was so strong that it covered every trace of the other. This whole place, with its polished, almost shining floor, struck us in some vague way. It seemed more puzzling and horrible than any of the terrible things we had met before.

The passage straight ahead was so regular that we could not mistake the right way. There were many cave mouths, all equally large, but this one was clear. Even so, we decided to start our paper trail again if the way became more complicated. For, of course, we could no longer expect tracks in the dust.

We went straight on again and threw the light of our torch over the tunnel walls. Then we stopped short in amazement. The carvings in this part of the passage had changed completely. We knew, of course, that the Old Ones' carving was very decadent when the tunnels were made. In fact, we had noticed the poorer work of the arabesques in the stretches behind us.

But now, in this deeper part beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference we could not explain at all. It was a difference in basic nature, not only in quality. The loss of skill was so deep and so terrible that nothing could have prepared us for it. The decline we had seen so far had been much slower.

This new, poor work was rough, bold and without any fine detail. It was cut too deep into the wall, in bands. These followed the same general line as the few cartouches in the earlier parts. But the raised parts of the carving did not reach the level of the wall's surface.

Danforth had an idea. He thought it was a second carving—a kind of palimpsest, made after an earlier design had been wiped out. It was only for decoration, in a fixed style. It was made of rough spirals and angles. These roughly followed the Old Ones' mathematical tradition, which was based on the number five. Yet it seemed more like a mocking copy of that tradition than a way of continuing it.

We could not spend much time studying it. So after a quick look we went on.

We saw and heard fewer penguins now. But we thought we caught a faint sound, like a chorus of them. It seemed endlessly far away, somewhere deep inside the earth. The new odor, which we could not explain, was horribly strong. We could hardly notice any sign of that other nameless scent.

Ahead of us were puffs of vapor that we could see. They showed that the differences in temperature were growing. And they showed that the sunless sea cliffs of the great abyss were fairly near. Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain objects lying on the polished floor ahead, blocking the way. They were quite certainly not penguins. We made sure that the objects were not moving at all. Then we turned on our second torch.

### Glossary

- **abyss**: a very deep hole or space that seems to have no bottom.
- **albino**: an animal with no color in its skin or feathers, so it is white.
- **rookery**: a place where many birds (here penguins) live and nest.
- **tarpaulin**: a large piece of strong, waterproof cloth used to cover things.
- **decadent**: in decline; later and of lower quality.
- **cartouches**: framed panels with carved designs on them.
- **arabesques**: decorative patterns of curved lines and shapes.
- **palimpsest**: a surface where the old writing or picture was removed and something new was put on top.
- **stalactites**: stone "icicles" hanging from a cave roof.
- **vapor**: a mist made of very small drops of water in the air.

## XI.

Once again I have come to a place where it is very hard to go on. I should be hardened by now. But some experiences cut too deep to heal. They leave me only more sensitive, so that memory brings back all the first horror.

As I have said, we saw some shapes lying in our way on the polished floor ahead. At almost the same moment, a strange, stronger form of the smell hit our noses. It was the new smell that filled the whole tunnel. Now it was clearly mixed with the nameless stench of those others who had gone before us.

The light of the second torch showed us clearly what the shapes were. We dared to go near them for one reason only. Even from a distance we could see that they could do no more harm. They were as harmless as the six similar specimens we had dug up at poor Lake's camp. Those had lain in the strange graves under the star-shaped mounds.

Indeed, they were as incomplete as most of the ones we had dug up. But a thick, dark-green pool was gathering around them. It showed that their damage was far more recent. There seemed to be only four of them. Yet Lake's bulletins suggested that no fewer than eight had gone before us. We had never expected to find them like this. We wondered what kind of terrible fight had taken place down here in the dark.

When penguins are attacked in a group, they fight back fiercely with their beaks. And now our ears told us for certain that there was a rookery far ahead. Had those others disturbed such a place? Had the birds then chased them to kill them? The shapes did not suggest it. Penguin beaks could hardly cause the terrible damage we were beginning to see. The tissues that Lake had dissected were far too tough. Besides, the huge blind birds we had seen seemed very peaceful.

Had there been a fight among those others, then? Were the missing four to blame? If so, where were they? Were they close by, and likely to be an immediate danger to us? We looked nervously at some of the smooth-floored side passages. All the while we kept moving forward, slowly and, to be honest, very unwillingly.

Whatever the fight was, it had clearly frightened the penguins. That was why they were wandering about, which they did not usually do. So the fight must have started near that faintly heard rookery, in the endless gulf beyond. There were no signs that any birds had ever lived here.

Perhaps, we thought, there had been a terrible running fight. Perhaps the weaker side had tried to get back to the sledges they had left behind. Then their hunters had caught them here and finished them. I could picture the wild, evil battle between these nameless beings. I saw it surging out of the black abyss. Great clouds of panicking penguins ran ahead of it, squawking.

I say that we came near those spread-out, incomplete shapes slowly and unwillingly. I wish to Heaven we had never gone near them at all! I wish we had run back at top speed out of that evil tunnel. Its floors were greasily smooth. Its poor, late carvings copied and mocked the older ones they had replaced. I wish we had run back before we saw what we did see. Then our minds would never have been burned by something that will never let us breathe easily again!

We turned both our torches on the bodies lying on the floor. Soon we understood the main reason why they were incomplete. They were torn, crushed, twisted and burst open. But the chief injury they all shared was this: their heads were gone.

From each one, the starfish head with its tentacles had been removed. As we came closer, we saw how it had been done. It did not look like ordinary cutting. It looked more like some hellish tearing or sucking.

Their bad-smelling dark-green ichor made a large, spreading pool. But its smell was half covered by that newer and stranger stench. Here it was sharper than anywhere else along our way.

We could not find where that second, unexplained smell came from until we were very close to the bodies. The moment we found it, Danforth gave a cry of tortured nerves. He was remembering certain very clear carvings of the Old Ones' history. They showed the Permian Age, one hundred and fifty million years ago. His cry echoed wildly through that ancient, arched passage with the evil palimpsest carvings.

I almost cried out myself. I had seen those ancient carvings too. I had admired them with a cold shiver. The unknown artist had skillfully shown a horrible coating of slime. It covered certain incomplete Old Ones, lying on the ground. The Shoggoths had killed them in their usual way and sucked off their heads. This happened in the great war, when the Old Ones made the Shoggoths their slaves again.

Those carvings were evil nightmare pictures, even though they told of things from long ago. Shoggoths and their work should never be seen by human beings. No beings of any kind should ever show them in pictures.

The mad author of the *Necronomicon* had nervously tried to swear that none had ever been bred on this planet. He said that only drugged dreamers had ever imagined them. Formless protoplasm that could copy and reflect every shape, organ and process! Thick, sticky masses of bubbling cells! Rubbery spheres fifteen feet across, endlessly soft and able to take any shape! Slaves of suggestion, builders of cities! More and more bad-tempered, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more able to copy! Great Heaven! What madness made even those unholy Old Ones willing to use such things, and to carve them?

And now Danforth and I saw the black slime. It was fresh and shining, with rainbow colors in the light. It clung thickly to those headless bodies. It stank horribly of that new, unknown smell. Only a sick mind could imagine what caused it. The slime also clung, more thinly, to a smooth part of the cursed, re-carved wall. There it sparkled in a series of grouped dots. When we saw all this, we understood cosmic fear to its very deepest depths.

It was not fear of those four missing others. We suspected all too well that they would never do harm again. Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things in their own way. They were the men of another age and another kind of being. Nature had played a hellish joke on them. Some day human madness, coldness or cruelty may drag up others in that dead or sleeping polar land. Nature will play the same joke on them. And this had been their tragic homecoming.

They had not even been savages. For what, indeed, had they done? Think of that awful waking in the cold of an unknown age! Perhaps the furry, wildly barking four-legged animals attacked them. In a daze, they defended themselves against these animals. And they defended themselves against the equally wild white apes with the strange wrappings and tools! Poor Lake. Poor Gedney. And poor Old Ones! They were scientists to the last. What had they done that we would not have done in their place? Lord, what intelligence they had, and how they never gave up! They faced the unbelievable, just as their carved relatives and ancestors had done. Those ancestors had faced things only a little less unbelievable! Radiates, vegetables, monsters, star spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!

They had crossed the icy peaks. Once, long ago, they had worshipped on the temple-covered slopes of those peaks. They had walked there among the tree ferns. They had found their dead city, lying under its curse. They had read the story of its last days in the carvings, as we had done. They had tried to reach their living people in the dark depths they knew only from legends. They had never seen those depths before. And what had they found?

All this flashed through Danforth's mind and mine at the same moment. We looked from those headless, slime-covered shapes to the disgusting palimpsest carvings. We looked at the evil dot groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them. We looked, and we understood. We knew what had won and survived in the Cyclopean water city of that black abyss below. Penguins lived around the edges of that abyss. And even now a pale, curling mist had begun to pour up from it. It was as if it answered Danforth's wild scream.

The shock of recognizing that slime and those missing heads had frozen us. We stood like silent, motionless statues. Only later did we talk about it. Then we learned that our thoughts at that moment had been exactly the same.

It seemed like ages that we stood there. But in fact it could not have been more than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pale mist curled toward us. It really seemed to be pushed by some large thing that was coming forward far behind it. And then came a sound. It upset much of what we had just decided. But it also broke the spell, and we could move. We ran like mad past squawking, confused penguins, over our old trail back to the city. We ran along corridors of huge stones, half sunk in ice, to the great open circle. Then we ran up that ancient spiral ramp. We rushed on wildly, without thinking, toward the sane outer air and the light of day.

The new sound, as I have hinted, upset much of what we had decided. This was because it was the very sound that poor Lake's dissection had made us expect. It was the voice of those beings we had just judged to be dead. Danforth later told me it was exactly what he had heard, very faintly, beyond the alley corner. That was far above, at the level of the ice. And it was terribly like the piping of the wind that we had both heard around the high mountain caves.

At the risk of seeming childish, I will add one more thing. I add it mainly because Danforth's impression matched mine in such a surprising way. Of course, the books we had both read prepared us to understand the sound in this way. But Danforth has hinted at some strange ideas. He thinks that Poe may have used secret, forbidden sources when he wrote his "Arthur Gordon Pym" a century ago.

Readers will remember a word in that strange tale that is connected with the antarctic. Its meaning is unknown, but it is terrible and very great. Giant, ghostly white birds scream it forever at the heart of that evil region. "*Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!*" I must admit that this is exactly what we thought we heard. It came in that sudden sound behind the white mist that was moving toward us. It was that creeping musical piping over a wide range.

We were running at full speed before three notes or syllables had sounded. Yet we knew how fast the Old Ones were. Perhaps a survivor of the killing had woken at the scream and was following us. It could catch us in a moment, if it really wanted to.

But we had a vague hope. Perhaps we could act peacefully and show that we could reason like it. Then such a being might spare us if it caught us. It might do so from scientific curiosity, if nothing else.

After all, if such a creature had nothing to fear for itself, it would have no reason to harm us. Hiding was useless now. So we turned the torch back for a quick glance as we ran. We saw that the mist was getting thinner. Would we see, at last, a complete and living specimen of those others? Again came that creeping musical piping—"*Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!*"

Then we noticed that we were actually gaining on the thing behind us. It occurred to us that it might be wounded. But we could take no chances. It was clearly coming in answer to Danforth's scream. It was not running away from some other being. The timing was too close for any doubt.

And where was that other nightmare? It was even harder to imagine, and even worse to name. It was that stinking, unseen mountain of protoplasm that poured out slime. Its race had conquered the abyss. It had sent pioneers up onto land to re-carve the burrows of the hills and squirm through them. We could not guess where it was. And it truly hurt us to leave this Old One behind. It was probably crippled, and perhaps it was the only survivor. We were leaving it to be caught again, and to a nameless fate.

Thank Heaven we did not slow down! The curling mist had grown thick again. It was driving forward faster than before. Behind us, the straying penguins were squawking and screaming. They showed signs of real panic. This surprised us, because they had only been a little confused when we passed them.

Once more came that evil, wide-ranged piping—"*Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!*" We had been wrong. The thing was not wounded. It had only stopped when it came to the bodies of its fallen relatives. It had stopped at the hellish slime writing above them. We could never know what that demon message said. But the burials at Lake's camp had shown how much these beings cared about their dead.

Our torch, which we now used without care, showed the large open cavern ahead of us. Several ways met there. We were glad to leave those sick palimpsest carvings behind. We could almost feel them, even when we could hardly see them.

The cave gave us another thought. We might lose the thing behind us at this confusing meeting place of large galleries. There were several of the blind albino penguins in the open space. Their fear of the approaching being was clearly extreme. It was so great that we could not explain it.

Suppose we dimmed our torch to the lowest light we needed for walking, and kept it pointed straight ahead. Then the frightened, squawking movements of the huge birds in the mist might cover the sound of our steps. They might hide the way we really went. Somehow they might even lead the thing the wrong way.

The floor of the main tunnel beyond this point was covered with rubbish and did not shine. In this it was different from the other burrows, which were polished in that sick way. But in the churning, spiraling fog, this would hardly stand out. We guessed that even the Old Ones' special senses might not notice it. Those senses made them partly, though not completely, independent of light in emergencies.

In fact, we were a little afraid of getting lost ourselves in our hurry. For we had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city. To get lost in those unknown honeycombs under the foothills would be unthinkable.

We survived and came out, and that is enough proof. The thing did take a wrong gallery, while we, by good luck, found the right one. The penguins alone could not have saved us. But together with the mist, they seem to have done so. Only a kind fate kept the curling vapors thick enough at the right moment. They were always moving, and always threatening to vanish.

Indeed, they did lift for one second, just before we came out of the sickeningly re-carved tunnel into the cave. At that moment we threw a last, desperate, frightened look backward. Then we meant to dim the torch and mix with the penguins, hoping to escape. And so we caught our first and only half glimpse of the thing that was coming. If the fate that hid us was kind, the fate that gave us that half glimpse was the very opposite. For half of all the horror that has haunted us ever since comes from that flash of half-sight.

Perhaps we looked back again only from the ancient instinct of the hunted. A hunted creature wants to know what is following it, and where it is going. Or perhaps one of our senses had raised a question deep in our minds. Perhaps we looked back to answer it without thinking.

In the middle of our flight, all our powers were fixed on escape. We were in no state to notice and study details. Yet even so, some hidden part of our brains must have wondered at the message from our noses. Later we realized what it was. We were moving away from the stinking slime on those headless bodies. At the same time, the thing hunting us was coming closer. Logic said that the smells should have changed places. But they had not.

Near the bodies on the floor, that new and unexplained smell had been strongest of all. By now it should have mostly given way to the nameless stench that belonged to those others. But this had not happened. Instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now almost pure. It was growing stronger and more poisonous every second.

So we looked back, both at the same time, it seems. No doubt one of us started to move, and the other copied him. As we did so, we flashed both torches at full strength on the mist, which was thin for a moment. Perhaps it was pure, primitive fear, and the wish to see everything we could. Or perhaps, without knowing it, we were trying to dazzle the thing. Then we could dim our light and slip away among the penguins in the center of the maze ahead.

Unhappy act! Not even Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more for a look backward. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping—"*Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!*"

Danforth broke down completely. The first thing I remember of the rest of the journey is his voice. He was chanting a wild formula, as if his head were light. To anyone else on earth it would have seemed mad and meaningless. Only I could find a meaning in it. It echoed in high, thin tones among the squawks of the penguins. It echoed through the arched roof ahead. And—thank Heaven—it echoed through the arches behind us, which were now empty. He could not have started it at once. If he had, we would not have been alive and racing blindly on. I tremble to think what a small 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 well-known stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel. That subway ran through our peaceful home soil, thousands of miles away in New England. Yet to me the chant did not seem meaningless, and it gave me no feeling of home. It held only horror. I knew without any doubt what had put it into his mind. It was a terrible comparison, too evil to name.

When we looked back, we had expected to see a terrible and unbelievable moving creature, if the mist was thin enough. But we had formed a clear idea of what that creature would be. What we did see was something completely different. For the mist had indeed grown thin, all too cruelly. And what we saw was far more horrible and hateful. It was the real, living form of the novelist's 'thing that should not be'. It was most like a huge subway train rushing in, as you see it from a station platform. The great black front comes looming out of an endless distance under the ground. It is dotted with strangely colored lights, and it fills the enormous tunnel.

But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track in front of it. The soft, shape-changing nightmare column oozed tightly forward through its fifteen-foot tunnel. It was stinking, and shining black with rainbow colors. It was gathering unholy speed. In front of it, it pushed a spiral cloud of the pale vapor from the abyss. The cloud was growing thick again.

It was a terrible thing that no words can describe. It was larger than any subway train. It was a shapeless mass of protoplasm bubbles, and it shone faintly with its own light. All over the front that filled the tunnel, countless short-lived eyes formed and melted away again. They looked like swellings of greenish light. That front bore down on us. It crushed the panicking penguins. It slid over the shining floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all rubbish.

Still that strange, mocking cry came—"*Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!*" And at last we remembered. The Old Ones alone had given the evil Shoggoths life and their shape-changing patterns of organs. The Shoggoths had no language except what the dot groups expressed. And so they had no voice either, except the copied sounds of their old masters.

### Glossary

- **rookery**: a place where many birds (here penguins) live and nest.
- **ichor**: the dark-green fluid in the Old Ones' bodies; it does the job of blood.
- **palimpsest**: a surface where the old writing or picture was removed and something new was put on top.
- **Permian Age**: a period of the earth's history, about 150 million years ago.
- **Shoggoths**: huge, shapeless creatures like black bubbling jelly, made by the Old Ones as slaves; they can form eyes and other body parts when they need them.
- **protoplasm**: the living jelly-like material inside cells.
- **Radiates**: animals built in a circle around a center, like starfish.
- **star spawn**: creatures born of or from the stars.
- **"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"**: the cry in Poe's "Arthur Gordon Pym", screamed by giant white birds near the South Pole.
- **Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife**: figures from old stories who were punished for looking back.
- **'thing that should not be'**: a thing that should not exist.

## XII.

Danforth and I remember coming out into the great carved hemisphere. We remember finding our way back along our trail, through the Cyclopean rooms and corridors of the dead city. But these are only fragments, like pieces of a dream. We have no memory of deciding anything, of any details, or of any physical effort.

There was something strangely fitting about the way we left those buried ages. We climbed, out of breath, up the sixty-foot cylinder of ancient stonework. As we wound our way up, we saw beside us a continuous line of heroic carvings. They were in the early, still perfect style of the dead race. It was a farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million years ago.

At last we climbed out at the top. We found ourselves on a great pile of fallen blocks. To the west rose the curved walls of higher stonework. To the east, beyond the more ruined buildings, we could see the dark, silent peaks of the great mountains.

The sky above was a churning mass of thin ice vapors, shining with soft, changing colors like an opal. The cold gripped us deep inside our bodies.

In less than a quarter of an hour we found the steep slope up to the foothills. It was probably an ancient terrace, and we had come down by it. Now we could see the dark shape of our big plane among the few ruins on the rising slope ahead.

Halfway up the hill, we stopped for a moment to catch our breath. We turned to look again at the strange tangle of unbelievable stone shapes below us. Once more it stood out mysteriously against an unknown west. As we looked, we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning mist. The restless ice vapors had moved up to the highest point of the sky. There their mocking shapes seemed about to settle into some strange pattern. But they seemed afraid to make it quite clear or complete.

Now, on the far white horizon behind the strange city, we could see a dim, fairy-like line of violet peaks. Their needle-pointed tops rose like a dream against the inviting rose color of the western sky. The ancient table-land sloped up toward this shining edge. The low course of the old river crossed it like an uneven ribbon of shadow.

For a second we held our breath in wonder at the scene's cosmic beauty, which seemed not of this earth. Then a vague horror began to creep into our souls. This far violet line could only be the terrible mountains of the forbidden land. They were the highest peaks on earth and the center of earth's evil. They hid nameless horrors and Archaean secrets. Those who feared to carve their meaning had stayed away from them, and prayed to them. No living thing of earth had ever walked on them. But evil lightnings visited them, and they sent strange beams across the plains in the polar night.

The carved maps and pictures in that city were older than mankind. If they told the truth, these mysterious violet mountains could not be much less than three hundred miles away. Yet their dim, fairy-like shapes stood out sharply above that distant, snowy edge. They were like the saw-toothed edge of a huge alien planet, about to rise into strange skies.

As I looked at them, I thought nervously of certain carved hints in the city. They showed what the great old river had washed down from those cursed slopes into the city. And I wondered how much sense and how much foolishness there had been in the fears of the Old Ones. They had carved those hints very carefully, saying as little as they could.

I remembered that the northern end of those mountains must come near the coast at Queen Mary Land. At that very moment, Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition was surely working there, less than a thousand miles away. I hoped no evil fate would show Sir Douglas and his men what might lie behind the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts show how strained my nerves were at the time. And Danforth seemed to be even worse.

But our fears soon changed. Before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane, they had moved to the nearer range. It was smaller, but still huge enough, and we had to cross it again.

From these foothills its black slopes, covered with ruins, rose up bare and terrible against the eastern sky. Again they reminded us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. We thought of the cursed honeycombs of tunnels inside them. We thought of the terrible shapeless beings that might be inside them too. Those beings might have pushed their stinking, twisting way up even to the highest hollow peaks. And we could not think without panic of flying past those cave mouths again. They stood high against the sky and seemed to hint at so much. There the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range.

To make things worse, we saw clear traces of mist around several of the summits. Poor Lake must have seen the same thing when he made that early mistake about volcanoes. And we felt cold with fear as we thought of the similar mist we had just escaped. We thought of that, and of the evil abyss full of horror, where all such vapors came from.

All was well with the plane. We clumsily pulled on our heavy flying furs. Danforth started the engine without trouble, and we made a very smooth take-off over the nightmare city.

High up there must have been great disturbance in the air. The ice-dust clouds high in the sky were doing all sorts of strange things. But at twenty-four thousand feet, the height we needed for the pass, we found that we could fly well enough.

As we came close to the sharp peaks, we heard the wind's strange piping again. I could see Danforth's hands shaking at the controls. I was only a beginner. Yet at that moment I thought I might handle the dangerous crossing between the peaks better than he could. I made signs to him that we should change seats, so that I could take over. He did not protest.

I tried to keep all my skill and calm. I stared at the part of the reddish sky beyond, between the walls of the pass.

But Danforth was free from flying now, and his nerves were wound up to a dangerous point. He could not keep still. I felt him turning and twisting about. He looked back at the terrible city as it moved away behind us. He looked ahead at the peaks, full of caves and covered with cubes. He looked sideways at the cold, empty sea of snowy foothills with their scattered ramparts. And he looked up at the wildly moving sky with its strange clouds.

Just then I was trying to steer safely through the pass. At that moment his mad screaming brought us very close to disaster. It broke my tight hold on myself. For a moment my hands could not work the controls properly. A second later my will won. 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 so madly. I feel sadly sure that this horror is the main cause of his present breakdown. We shouted a little to each other above the piping of the wind and the buzzing of the engine. This was as we reached the safe side of the range and flew slowly down toward the camp. But we mostly talked about the promises of secrecy we made as we got ready to leave the nightmare city.

All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. He says it had nothing to do with the cubes and caves of the mountains of madness that we crossed. Those mountains were full of echoes and vapors, and full of tunnels, as if worms had eaten through them. It was a single wild, devilish glimpse among the churning clouds high in the western sky. It showed what lay behind those other violet mountains in the west, which the Old Ones had avoided and feared.

On rare occasions he has whispered broken, wild things. He has spoken of "the black pit," "the carven rim," "the proto-Shoggoths," and "the windowless solids with five dimensions." He has whispered of "the nameless cylinders," "the elder pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," and "the primal white jelly." There were also "the color out of space," "the wings," "the eyes in darkness," and "the moon-ladder." And there was "the original, the eternal, the undying," and other strange ideas. But when he is fully himself, he denies all this. He says it comes from the strange, dark books he read in earlier years. Indeed, Danforth is known to be one of the few who have ever dared to read the whole *Necronomicon*. He read the worm-eaten copy that the college library keeps under lock and key.

The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely full of vapor and disturbed enough. I did not see the highest part of the sky myself. But I can easily imagine that its swirls of ice dust took strange forms. Such layers of restless cloud can sometimes reflect distant scenes very clearly. They can bend them and make them larger. Imagination, knowing this, could easily have supplied the rest. And of course, Danforth did not hint at any of these particular horrors until later. By then his memory had had a chance to draw on his old reading. He could never have seen so much in one single glance.

At the time, his screams were only one mad word, said over and over. Its source was all too obvious: "*Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!*"

### Glossary

- **hemisphere**: a shape like half a ball; here a large underground room with a round, dome-shaped roof.
- **Cyclopean**: made of enormous stone blocks, as if built by giants.
- **opal**: a stone that shines with soft, changing colors.
- **foothills**: the low hills at the bottom of a high mountain range.
- **churning**: moving and turning around wildly.
- **terrace**: a flat step cut into a slope.
- **table-land**: a high flat area of land.
- **Archaean**: from the earliest age of the earth's history.
- **mirage**: an image in the air caused by light bending in cold or hot air. Things far away seem to float or change shape.
- **proto-Shoggoths**: the earliest Shoggoths.
- **pharos**: a lighthouse.
- **Yog-Sothoth**: the name of a terrible being or god in the old myths.
- **Necronomicon**: a famous, frightening old book of dark magic and secret history, written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. The college library keeps a copy locked up.