At the mountains of madness
unguided evolution acting on life cells made by the Old Ones, but
escaping beyond their radius of attention. They had been suffered
to develop unchecked because they had not come in conflict with the
dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically
exterminated.
It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent
sculptures a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and
sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely
simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of
land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally
lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to
palæontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic
changes and convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of
miraculous. Though few or none of their first cities seem to have
remained beyond the Archæan Age, there was no interruption in their
civilization or in the transmission of their records.
Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean,
and it is likely that they came not long after the matter forming the
moon was wrenched from the neighboring South Pacific. According to one
of the sculptured maps, the whole globe was then under water, with
stone cities scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as æons
passed.
Another map shows a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole, where
it is evident that some of the beings made experimental settlements,
though their main centers were transferred to the nearest sea bottom.
Later maps, which display this land mass as cracking and drifting, and
sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the
theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and
Joly.
With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific, tremendous events
began. Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that
was not the worst misfortune. Another race--a land race of beings
shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous prehuman
spawn of Cthulhu--soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and
precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones
wholly back to the sea--a colossal blow in view of the increasing land
settlements.
Later, peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu
spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands. New land
cities were founded--the greatest of them in the antarctic, for this
region of first arrival was sacred.
From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the center of the Old
Ones' civilization, and all the cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn
were blotted out.
Then, suddenly, the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them
the frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that
the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet, except for one shadowy
fear about which they did not like to speak.
At a rather later age their cities dotted all the land and water areas
of the globe--hence the recommendation in my coming monograph that some
archæologist make systematic borings with Pabodie's type of apparatus
in certain widely separated regions.
* * * * *
The steady trend down the ages was from water to land--a movement
encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never
wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new
difficulty in breeding and managing the Shoggoths upon which successful
sea life depended.
With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of
creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost, so that the Old
Ones had to depend on the molding of forms already in existence. On
land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the Shoggoths of
the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of
accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem.
They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestion of
the Old Ones, and had modeled their tough plasticity into various
useful temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modeling powers
were sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative
forms implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a
semistable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition
echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it.
Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with
horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed
of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and
each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had,
however, a constantly shifting shape and volume--throwing out temporary
developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech
in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to
suggestion.
They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of
the Permian Age, perhaps one hundred and fifty million years ago, when
a veritable war of resubjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old
Ones. Pictures of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion
in which the Shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a
marvelously fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold
ages.
The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbance against
the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory.
Thereafter the sculptures showed a period in which Shoggoths were tamed
and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west
were tamed by cowboys.
Though during the rebellion the Shoggoths had shown an ability to
live out of water, this transition was not encouraged--since their
usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble
of their management.
During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the
form of a new invasion from outer space--this time by half-fungous,
half-crustacean creatures--creatures undoubtedly the same as those
figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered
in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men.
To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, for the first time
since their terrene advent, to sally forth again into the planetary
ether; but, despite all traditional preparations, found it no longer
possible to leave the earth's atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of
interstellar travel had been, it was now definitely lost to the race.
In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands,
though they were powerless to disturb those in the sea. Little by
little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original antarctic
habitat was beginning.
* * * * *
It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu
spawn and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely
different from that which we know than was the substance of the Old
Ones. They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations
impossible for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally
come from even remoter gulfs of cosmic space.
The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital
properties, were strictly material, and must have had their absolute
origin within the known space-time continuum--whereas the first
sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath.
All this, of course, assuming that the nonterrestrial linkages and
the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are not pure mythology.
Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework
to account for their occasional defeats, since historical interest
and pride obviously formed their chief psychological element. It is
significant that their annals failed to mention many advanced and
potent races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering ethics figure
persistently in certain obscure legends.
The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared
with startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In
certain cases existing science will require revision, while in other
cases its bold deductions are magnificently confirmed.
As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all
the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which
cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically
viscous lower surface--an hypothesis suggested by such things as the
complimentary outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the
great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up--receives striking
support from this uncanny source.
Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous of a hundred million or
more years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later
to separate Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe (then
the Valusia of primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic
continent.
Other charts--and most significantly one in connection with the
founding fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around
us--showed all the present continents well differentiated. And in
the latest discoverable specimen--dating perhaps from the Pliocene
Age--the approximate world of to-day appeared quite clearly despite the
linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe through
Greenland, and of South America with the antarctic continent through
Graham Land.
In the Carboniferous map the whole globe--ocean floor and rifted land
mass alike--bore symbols of the Old Ones' vast stone cities, but in the
later charts the gradual recession toward the antarctic became very
plain.
The final Pliocene specimen showed no land cities except on the
antarctic continent and the tip of South America, nor any ocean
cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge
and interest in the northern world, save for a study of coast lines
probably made during long exploration flights on those fan-like
membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones.
Destruction of cities through the up-thrust of mountains, the
centrifugal rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or
sea bottom, and other natural causes was a matter of common record; and
it was curious to observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as
the ages wore on.
The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last
general center of the race--built early in the Cretaceous Age after a
titanic earth buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not
far distant.
It appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of
all, where reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea
bottom. In the new city--many of whose features we could recognize
in the sculptures, but which stretched fully a hundred miles along
the mountain range in each direction beyond the farthest limits of
our aërial survey--there were reputed to be preserved certain sacred
stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city, which were thrust up
to light after long epochs in the course of the general crumpling of
strata.
VIII.
Naturally, Danforth and I studied with special interest and a
peculiarly personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate
district in which we were. Of this local material there was naturally a
vast abundance.
On the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find
a house of very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a
neighboring rift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying
the story of the region, much beyond the Pliocene map, whence we