At the mountains of madness
of snow to hold it in place amidst the rising gale, for the titan
mountains seemed about to deliver some gravely severe blasts. Early
apprehensions about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and under
Atwood's supervision precautions were taken to bank the tents, new dog
corral, and crude aëroplane shelters with snow, on the mountainward
side. These latter shelters, begun with hard snow blocks during odd
moments, were by no means as high as they should have been; and Lake
finally detached all hands from other tasks to work on them.
It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised
us all to share the rest period his outfit would take when the shelter
walls were a little higher. He held some friendly chat with Pabodie
over the ether, and repeated his praise of the really marvelous drills
that had helped him make his discovery. Atwood also sent greetings and
praises.
I gave Lake a warm word of congratulation, owning up that he was right
about the western trip, and we all agreed to get in touch by wireless
at ten in the morning. If the gale was then over, Lake would send a
plane for the party at my base. Just before retiring I dispatched a
final message to the _Arkham_, with instructions about toning down the
day's news for the outside world, since the full details seemed radical
enough to rouse a wave of incredulity until further substantiated.
III.
None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning.
Both the excitement of Lake's discovery and the mounting fury of the
wind were against such a thing. So savage was the blast even where we
were, that we could not help wondering how much worse it was at Lake's
camp, directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it.
McTighe was awake at ten o'clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless,
as agreed, but some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the
westward seemed to prevent communication. We did, however, get the
_Arkham_, and Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly trying
to reach Lake. He had not known about the wind, for very little was
blowing at McMurdo Sound, despite its persistent rage where we were.
Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at
intervals, but invariably without results. About noon a positive frenzy
of wind stampeded out of the west, causing us to fear for the safety of
our camp; but it eventually died down, with only a moderate relapse at
two p.m.
After three o'clock it was very quiet, and we redoubled our efforts to
get Lake. Reflecting that he had four planes, each provided with an
excellent short-wave outfit, we could not imagine any ordinary accident
capable of crippling all his wireless equipment at once. Nevertheless,
the stony silence continued, and when we thought of the delirious force
the wind must have had in his locality we could not help making the
most direful conjectures.
By six o'clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after a
wireless consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take
steps toward investigation. The fifth aëroplane, which we had left
at the McMurdo Sound supply cache with Sherman and two sailors, was
in good shape and ready for instant use, and it seemed that the very
emergency for which it had been saved was now upon us.
I got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to join me with the plane
and the two sailors at the southern base as quickly as possible, the
air conditions being apparently highly favorable. We then talked over
the personnel of the coming investigation party, and decided that we
would include all hands, together with the sledge and dogs which I
had kept with me. Even so great a load would not be too much for one
of the huge planes built to our special orders for heavy machinery
transportation. At intervals I still tried to reach Lake with the
wireless, but all to no purpose.
Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at seven
thirty; and reported a quiet flight from several points on the wing.
They arrived at our base at midnight, and all hands at once discussed
the next move. It was risky business sailing over the antarctic in a
single aëroplane without any line of bases, but no one drew back from
what seemed like the plainest necessity. We turned in at two o'clock
for a brief rest after some preliminary loading of the plane, but were
up again in four hours to finish the loading and packing.
At seven fifteen a.m., January 25th, we started northwestward under
McTighe's pilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food
supply, and other items including the plane's wireless outfit. The
atmosphere was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature,
and we anticipated very little trouble in reaching the latitude and
longitude designated by Lake as the site of his camp. Our apprehensions
were over what we might find, or fail to find, at the end of our
journey, for silence continued to answer all calls dispatched to the
camp.
* * * * *
Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my
recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my
loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the
normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external
nature and nature's laws.
Thenceforward the ten of us--but the student Danforth and myself
above all others--were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking
horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we
would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could. The
newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plane,
telling of our nonstop course, our two battles with treacherous
upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had sunk
his mid-journey shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of
those strange fluffy snow cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as
rolling in the wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau.
There came a point, though, when our sensations could not be conveyed
in any words the press would understand, and a later point when we had
to adopt an actual rule of strict censorship.
The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones
and pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent every one to the windows of
the great cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in
gaining prominence; hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off,
and visible only because of their abnormal height.
Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky,
allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and
to catch the curious sense of phantasy which they inspired as seen
in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of
iridescent ice-dust clouds.
In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of
stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these
stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into
forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space,
and ultradimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil
things--mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some
accursed ultimate abyss.
That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable
suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially
spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness,
separateness, desolation, and æon-long death of this untrodden and
unfathomed austral world.
* * * * *
It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities
of the higher mountain sky line--regularities like clinging fragments
of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which
indeed justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of
primordial temple ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and
strangely painted by Roerich.
There was indeed something hauntingly Roerichlike about this whole
unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October
when we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now.
I felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of archæan mythical
resemblances, of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the
evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings.
Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia, but the racial memory of
man--or of his predecessors--is long, and it may well be that certain
tales have come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror
earlier than Asia and earlier than any human world we know.
A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the
fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees
of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself.
Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region I
would care to be in or near, nor did I relish the proximity of a
world that had ever bred such ambiguous and archæan monstrosities as
those Lake had just mentioned. At the moment I felt sorry that I had
ever read the abhorred _Necronomicon_, or talked so much with that
unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the university.
* * * * *
This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre
mirage which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith
as we drew near the mountains and began to make out the cumulative
undulations of the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages during
the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically
vivid as the present sample, but this one had a wholly novel and
obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething
labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the
troubled ice vapors above our heads.
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to
man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black
masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There
were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by
tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often
capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks, and strange, beetling,
tablelike constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular
slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one
overlapping the one beneath.
There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting
cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and
occasional needlelike spires in curious clusters of five.
All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges
crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the
implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer
giganticism.
The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms
observed and drawn by the arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820, but at
this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring
stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds,
and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our
expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and
infinitely evil portent.
I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process
the various nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted, temporary
forms of even vaster hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to
churning opalescence, we began to look earthward again, and saw that
our journey's end was not far off.
The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzily up like a fearsome rampart of