At the mountains of madness
"--the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole--
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole."
Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a
good deal of Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic
scene of Poe's only long story--the disturbing and enigmatical _Arthur
Gordon Pym_. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the
background, myriad of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their
fins, while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or
sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island
shortly after midnight, on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of
cable from each of the ships and preparing to unload supplies by means
of a breeches-buoy arrangement.
Our sensations on first treading antarctic soil were poignant and
complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton
expeditions had preceded us.
Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano's slope was only a
provisional one, headquarters being kept aboard the _Arkham_. We landed
all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline
tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and
aërial, aëroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small
portable wireless outfits--besides those in the planes--capable of
communicating with the _Arkham's_ large outfit from any part of the
antarctic continent that we would be likely to visit.
The ship's outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey
press reports to the _Arkham Advertiser's_ powerful wireless station
on Kingsport Head, Mass. We hoped to complete our work during a single
antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible we would winter on the
_Arkham_, sending the _Miskatonic_ north before the freezing of the ice
for another summer's supplies.
* * * * *
I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our
early work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings
at several points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which
Pabodie's apparatus accomplished them, even through solid rock layers;
our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous
ascent of the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final
assembling of five huge aëroplanes at the camp atop the barrier.
The health of our land party--twenty men and fifty-five Alaskan sledge
dogs--was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no
really destructive temperatures or windstorms.
For the most part, the thermometer varied between zero and 20° or 25°
above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to
rigors of this sort. The barrier camp was semipermanent, and destined
to be a storage cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite, and other
supplies.
Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring
material, the fifth being left with a pilot and two men, from the
ships, at the storage cache to form a means of reaching us from the
_Arkham_ in case all our exploring planes were lost.
Later, when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we
would employ one or two in a shuttle transportation service between
this cache and another permanent base on the great plateau from six
hundred to seven hundred miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier.
Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests
that pour down from the plateau, we determined to dispense with
intermediate bases, taking our chances in the interest of economy and
probable efficiency.
Wireless reports have spoken of the breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop
flight of our squadron on November 21st over the lofty shelf ice, with
vast peaks rising on the west, and the unfathomed silences echoing to
the sound of our engines.
Wind troubled us only moderately, and our radio compasses helped us
through the one opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise loomed
ahead, between Latitudes 83° and 84°, we knew we had reached Beardmore
Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen
sea was now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coast line.
At last we were truly entering the white, æon-dead world of the
ultimate south. Even as we realized it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen
in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of almost fifteen
thousand feet.
The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in
Latitude 86° 7´, East Longitude 174° 23´, and the phenomenally rapid
and effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by
our sledge trips and short aëroplane flights, are matters of history;
as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and
two of the graduate students--Gedney and Carroll--on December 13th to
15th.
We were some eight thousand five hundred feet above sea-level. When
experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down
through the snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of
the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at
many places, where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing
mineral specimens.
The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed
our belief that this plateau was homogeneous, with the great bulk of
the continent to the west, but somewhat different from the parts lying
eastward below South America--which we then thought to form a separate
and smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction
of Ross and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the report.
In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring
revealed their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings
and fragments; notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such
mollusks as linguellæ and gastropods--all of which seemed of real
significance in connection with the region's primordial history. There
was also a queer triangular, striated marking, about a foot in greatest
diameter, which Lake pieced together from three fragments of slate
brought up from a deep-blasted aperture.
These fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen
Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious
marking unusually puzzling and provocative, though to my geological eye
it looked not unlike some of the ripple effects reasonably common in
the sedimentary rocks.
Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into which a
sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself produces
odd distorting effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no reason
for extreme wonder over the striated depression.
* * * * *
On January 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Daniels, all six of the students,
four mechanics, and myself flew directly over the south pole in two
of the great planes, being forced down once by a sudden high wind,
which, fortunately, did not develop into a typical storm. This was,
as the papers have stated, one of several observation flights, during
others of which we tried to discern new topographical features in areas
unreached by previous explorers.
Our early flights were disappointing in this latter respect, though
they afforded us some magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and
deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had
given us some brief foretastes.
Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the
whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land
of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the
low midnight sun.
On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying, owing to the
tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent
void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.
At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying five
hundred miles eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing
a fresh sub-base at a point which would probably be on the smaller
continental division, as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological
specimens obtained there would be desirable for purposes of comparison.
Our health so far had remained excellent--lime juice well offsetting
the steady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperatures generally
above zero enabling us to do without our thickest furs.
It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we might be able to
conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long
antarctic night. Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the
west, but we had escaped damage through the skill of Atwood in devising
rudimentary aëroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and
in reinforcing the principal camp buildings with snow. Our good luck
and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.
The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told also
of Lake's strange and dogged insistence on a westward--or rather,
northwestward--prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new
base.
It seems that he had pondered a great deal and with alarmingly radical
daring over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into
it certain contradictions in nature and geological period which whetted
his curiosity to the utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings
and blastings in the west-stretching formation to which the exhumed
fragments evidently belonged.
He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some
bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably
advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of
so vastly ancient a date--Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian--as to
preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life,
but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite
stage. These fragments, with their odd marking, must have been five
hundred million to a thousand million years old.
II.
Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless
bulletins of Lake's start northwestward into regions never trodden
by human foot or penetrated by human imagination, though we did not
mention his wild hopes of revolutionizing the entire sciences of
biology and geology.
His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 11th to 18th
with Pabodie and five others--marred by the loss of two dogs in an
upset when crossing one of the great pressure ridges in the ice--had
brought up more and more of the Archæan slate; and even I was
interested by the singular profusion of evident fossil markings in that
unbelievably ancient stratum.
These markings, however, were of very primitive life forms involving
no great paradox except that any life forms should occur in rock as
definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed to
see the good sense of Lake's demand for an interlude in our time-saving
program--an interlude requiring the use of all four planes, many men,
and the whole of the expedition's mechanical apparatus.
I did not, in the end, veto the plan, though I decided not to accompany
the northwestward party despite Lake's plea for my geological advice.
While they were gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie and five
men and work out final plans for the eastward shift. In preparation for
this transfer, one of the planes had begun to move up a good gasoline
supply from McMurdo Sound; but this could wait temporarily. I kept
with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be at any time