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.
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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.