At the mountains of madness
thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich.
The ancient and wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all of
Lake's bulletins, and proved that these pinnacles had been towering
up in exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in earth's
history--perhaps over fifty million years. How much higher they had
once been, it was futile to guess; but everything about this strange
region pointed to obscure atmospheric influences unfavorable to
change, and calculated to retard the usual climatic processes of rock
disintegration.
But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave
mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a
field glass and took aërial photographs while Danforth drove; and at
times I relieved him at the controls--though my aviation knowledge was
purely an amateur's--in order to let him use the binoculars.
We could easily see that much of the material of the things was a
lightish archæan quartzite, unlike any formation visible over broad
areas of the general surface; and that their regularity was extreme and
uncanny to an extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted.
As he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold
æons of savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough
material had saved them from obliteration. Many parts, especially
those closest to the slopes, seemed identical in substance with the
surrounding rock surface.
The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Macchu Picchu in
the Andes, or the primal foundation walls of Kish as dug up by the
Oxford-Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and I
obtained that occasional impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which
Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll.
How to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and
I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have
strange regularities--like the famous Giants' Causeway in Ireland--but
this stupendous range, despite Lake's original suspicion of smoking
cones, was above all else nonvolcanic in evident structure.
The curious cave mouths, near which the odd formation seemed most
abundant, presented another, albeit a lesser puzzle because of their
regularity of outline. They were, as Lake's bulletin had said, often
approximately square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had
been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand. Their numerousness
and wide distribution were remarkable, and suggested that the whole
region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata.
Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within the caverns, but
we saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites.
Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures
seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the
slight cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual
patterns.
Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the
camp, he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling
groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so
hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above those six
buried monstrosities.
* * * * *
We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along
toward the relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we
occasionally looked down at the snow and ice of the land route,
wondering whether we could have attempted the trip with the simpler
equipment of earlier days.
Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the terrain was far from difficult
as such things go; and that despite the crevasses and other bad spots
it would not have been likely to deter the sledges of a Scott, a
Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appeared to lead up to
wind-bared passes with unusual continuity, and upon reaching our chosen
pass we found that its case formed no exception.
Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest
and peer out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper;
even though we had no cause to think the regions beyond the range
essentially different from those already seen and traversed. The touch
of evil mystery in these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of
opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and
attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words. Rather was it
an affair of vague psychological symbolism and æsthetic association--a
thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths
lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes.
Even the wind's burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity;
and for a second it seemed that the composite sound included a bizarre
musical whistling, or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in
and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave mouths. There was a cloudy
note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable
as any of the other dark impressions.
We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of twenty-three thousand
five hundred and seventy feet according to the aneroid; and had left
the region of clinging snow definitely below us. Up here were only
dark, bare rock slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers--but with
those provocative cubes, ramparts, and echoing cave mouths to add a
portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and the dreamlike.
Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the one
mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed to be
half lost in a queer antarctic haze--such a haze, perhaps, as had been
responsible for Lake's early notion of volcanism.
The pass loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept between its
jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a sky fretted with
swirling vapors and lighted by the low polar sun--the sky of that
mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.
A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth
and I, unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind
that raced through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled
engines, exchanged eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last
few feet, we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the
unsampled secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth.
V.
I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder,
terror, and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass
and saw what lay beyond. Of course, we must have had some natural
theory in the back of our heads to steady our faculties for the moment.
Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones
of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the fantastically symmetrical
wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps we even half thought
the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on first
approaching those mountains of madness.
We must have had some such normal notions to fall back upon as our
eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the
almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically
eurythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and pitted crests
above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its
thickest, and in places obviously thinner.
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish
violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here,
on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high,
and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less
than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the
vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of
mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and
artificial cause.
We had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned,
any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other
than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise, when man himself
could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time
when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial
death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this
Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which
cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous
city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That
damnable portent had had a material basis after all--there had been
some horizontal stratum of ice dust in the upper air, and this shocking
stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according
to the simple laws of reflection. Of course, the phantom had been
twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source
did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it
even more hideous and menacing than its distant image.
Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers
and ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in
the hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of years it had brooded
there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland. "Corona Mundi--Roof of the
World----" All sorts of fantastic phrases sprang to our lips as we
looked dizzily down at the unbelievable spectacle.
I thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently
haunted me since my first sight of this dead antarctic world--of
the demonic plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men
of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their prehuman
implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of the _Necronomicon_, and of the
Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than formless
star spawn associated with that semientity.
* * * * *
For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with
very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and
left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it
from the actual mountain rim, we decided that we could see no thinning
at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through
which we had come. We had merely struck, at random, a limited part of
something of incalculable extent.
The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone
structures, linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and
ramparts which evidently formed its mountain outposts. These latter,
as well as the queer cave mouths, were as thick on the inner as on the
outer sides of the mountains.
The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of
walls from ten to one hundred and fifty feet in ice-clear height,
and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composed
mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and
sandstone--blocks in many cases as large as 4 × 6 × 8 feet--though in
several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed rock
of pre-Cambrian slate.
The buildings were far from equal in size, there being innumerable
honeycomb arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate
structures.
The general shape of these things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or
terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes,
clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar
sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly