At the mountains of madness
At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea,
its architecture much like that of the city above, and its workmanship
displaying relatively little decadence because of the precise
mathematical element inherent in building operations.
The newly bred Shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular
intelligence, and were represented as taking and executing orders with
marvelous quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by
mimicking their voices--a sort of musical piping over a wide range,
if poor Lake's dissection had indicated aright--and to work more from
spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times.
They were, however, kept in admirable control. The phosphorescent
organisms supplied light with vast effectiveness, and doubtless atoned
for the loss of the familiar polar auroras of the outer-world night.
Art and decoration were pursued, though, of course, with a certain
decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realize this falling off themselves,
and in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by
transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their
land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped
Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital
greater splendors than its own people could create. That the transfer
of sculptured blocks had not been more extensive, was doubtless owing
to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned.
By the time total abandonment did occur--and it surely must have
occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced--the Old Ones
had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art--or had ceased
to recognize the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate,
the æon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale
sculptural denudation, though all the best separate statues, like other
movables, had been taken away.
The decadent cartouches and dados telling this story were, as I have
said, the latest we could find in our limited search. They left us with
a picture of the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land
city in summer and the sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading
with the sea-bottom cities off the antarctic coast.
By this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have been
recognized, for the sculptures showed many signs of the cold's malign
encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the
winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer.
The saurian live stock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were
standing it none too well. To keep on with the work of the upper
world it had become necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and
curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land life--a thing the Old Ones
had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless,
and the upper sea had lost most of its denizens except the seals and
whales. All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque
penguins.
What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new
sea-cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in
eternal blackness? Had the subterranean waters frozen at last? To what
fate had the ocean-bottom cities of the outer world been delivered?
Had any of the Old Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice cap?
Existing geology shows no trace of their presence. Had the frightful
Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land world of the north? Could
one be sure of what might or might not linger, even to this day, in the
lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth's deepest water?
Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of
pressure--and men of the sea have fished up curious objects at
times. And has the killer-whale theory really explained the savage
and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a generation ago by
Borchgrevingk?
The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for
their geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been
a very early date in the land city's history. They were, according to
their location, certainly not less than thirty million years old, and
we reflected that in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the
cavern itself, had had no existence.
They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary
vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around
them, and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty
mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean.
And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens--especially
about the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake's hideously
ravaged camp. There was something abnormal about that whole
business--the strange things we had tried so hard to lay to somebody's
madness--those frightful graves--the amount _and nature_ of the
missing material--Gedney--the unearthly toughness of those archaic
monstrosities, and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now showed
the race to have----Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last
few hours, and were prepared to believe and keep silent about many
appalling and incredible secrets of primal nature.
IX.
I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a
change in our immediate objective. This, of course, had to do with the
chiseled avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had
not known before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse.
From the evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply
descending walk of about a mile through either of the neighboring
tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs about
the great abyss, down whose side paths, improved by the Old Ones, led
to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this
fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of
resistance once we knew of the thing--yet we realized we must begin the
quest at once if we expected to include it in our present trip.
In was now eight p.m., and we had not enough battery replacements to
let our torches burn on forever. We had done so much of our studying
and copying below the glacial level that our battery supply had had at
least five hours of nearly continuous use, and despite the special dry
cell formula would obviously be good for only about four more--though
by keeping one torch unused, except for especially interesting or
difficult places, we might manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that.
It would not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean catacombs,
hence in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further
mural deciphering. Of course, we intended to revisit the place for days
and perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography--curiosity having
long ago gotten the better of horror--but just now we must hasten.
Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were
reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment
it, but we did let one large notebook go. If worst came to worst, we
could resort to rock chipping--and, of course, it would be possible,
even in case of really lost direction, to work up to full daylight by
one channel or another if granted sufficient time for plentiful trial
and error. So, at last, we set off eagerly in the indicated direction
of the nearest tunnel.
According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired
tunnel mouth could not be much more than a quarter of a mile from where
we stood; the intervening space showing solid-looking buildings quite
likely to be penetrable still at a subglacial level. The opening itself
would be in the basement--on the angle nearest the foothills--of a
vast five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial
nature, which we tried to identify from our aërial survey of the ruins.
No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we
concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had
been totally shattered in an ice rift we had noticed. In the latter
case the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would
have to try the next nearest one--the one less than a mile to the north.
The intervening river course prevented our trying any of the more
southern tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighboring
ones were choked it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant
an attempt on the next northerly one--about a mile beyond our second
choice.
* * * * *
As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map
and compass--traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or
preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges
and clambering down again, encountering choked doorways and piles of
débris, hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily
immaculate stretches, taking false leads and retracing our way (in such
cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while
striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight poured or
trickled down--we were repeatedly tantalized by the sculptured walls
along our route.
We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel's
mouth--having crossed a second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the
tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor especially
rich in decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of
late workmanship--when, about eight thirty p.m., Danforth's keen young
nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual.
If we had had a dog with us, I suppost we would have been warned
before. At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the
formerly crystal-pure air, but after a few seconds our memories reached
only too definitely. Let me try to state the thing without flinching.
There was an odor--and that odor was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably
akin to what had nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the
horror poor Lake had dissected.
Of course, the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it
sounds now. There were several conceivable explanations, and we did a
good deal of indecisive whispering. Most important of all, we did not
retreat without further investigation; for having come this far, we
were loath to be balked by anything short of certain disaster.
Anyway, what we must have suspected was altogether too wild to believe.
Such things did not happen in any normal world. It was probably sheer
irrational instinct which made us dim our single torch--tempted no
longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly
from the oppressive walls--and which softened our progress to a
cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the increasingly littered floor
and heaps of débris.
Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was
likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the débris after we
had passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors
on the ground level. It did not look quite as it ought after countless
thousands of years of desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more
light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked
through it. The irregular nature of the latter precluded any definite
marks, but in the smoother places there were suggestions of the
dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there was a hint of parallel
tracks, as if of runners. This was what made us pause again.
It was during that pause that we caught--simultaneously this time--the
other odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a
more frightful odor--less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely