Classic Audiobook Collection - At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft ~ Full Audiobook [horror]

Episode Date: April 27, 2024

At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft audiobook. Genre: horror An ambitious Antarctic expedition sets out to claim scientific glory at the coldest edge of the world - but what the team uncovers beneath the ice will challenge every assumption they have about life on Earth. Narrated by a shaken survivor, At the Mountains of Madness follows Professor William Dyer of Miskatonic University as he tries to warn the world away from a return to the polar wastes. When a secondary party makes a startling discovery of strange fossils and impossibly ancient evidence of biology, Dyer and his graduate student Danforth fly out to investigate. Their journey leads them to a vast, cyclopean mountain range and a ruined city whose alien architecture hints at intellects older than humanity. As storm, isolation, and dwindling supplies press in, the true danger proves not only the brutal environment but the implications of what once lived - and may still endure - in the darkness below. Blending scientific detail with creeping dread, Lovecraft crafts a tale of awe and terror in which curiosity becomes a liability, and knowledge itself threatens sanity. The central question is not simply what happened in Antarctica, but whether humankind can survive the truth of its own insignificance. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:21:32) Chapter 02 (00:58:09) Chapter 03 (01:20:08) Chapter 04 (01:39:14) Chapter 05 (02:06:05) Chapter 06 (02:22:12) Chapter 07 (02:42:59) Chapter 08 (03:00:24) Chapter 09 (03:22:48) Chapter 10 (03:39:18) Chapter 11 (04:00:47) Chapter 12 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft Chapter 1 I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the Antarctic, with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice cap. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain.

doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable. Yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in my favor, for they are damnnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures, notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over. In the end, I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have, on the one hand,

sufficient independence of thought, to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth cycles, and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and over-ambitious program in the region of of those mountains of madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men, like myself and my associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned. It is further against us that we are not in the strictest sense specialists in the fields, which came primarily to be concerned.

As a geologist, my object in leading the Miscatonic University expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the Antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Professor Frank H. Pabody of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this, but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection. Pobody's drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the small circular rock drill, and such a way is to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steelhead, jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish removal auger, and sectional piping for boars five inches wide and up to one

thousand feet deep, all formed, with needed accessories no greater low than three seven dog sledges could carry, this being made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were fashioned. Four large Dornier aeroplanes designed, especially for the tremendous altitude flying necessary on the Antarctic plateau, and with added fuel warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabody, could transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us. We planned to cover as great an area as one Antarctic season, or longer, if absolutely necessary, would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and on

the plateau south of Ross Sea. Regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Bird, with frequent changes of camp made by aeroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance. We expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material, especially in the Precambrian strata, of which so narrow a range of Antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as possible

a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the Earth's past. that the Antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens marine fauna arachnida and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals is a matter of common information and we hope to expand that information in variety accuracy and detail when a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs we would enlarge the aperture by blasting

in order to get specimens of suitable size and condition Our borings, a varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper soil of rock, were to be confined to exposed or nearly exposed land surfaces, these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels. We could not afford to waste drilling depth on any considerable amount of mere glaciation, though Pobody had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes and thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with current from a gasoline-driven-driven dynamo.

It is this plan, which we could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition such as ours, that the coming Starkweather Moor expedition proposes to follow, despite the warnings I've issued since our return from the Antarctic. The public knows of the Miscatonic expedition through our frequent wireless reports to the Arkham Advisor and Associated Press, and through the later articles of Pobody and myself, We consisted of four men from the university, Pobody, Lake of the Biology Department, Atwood of the physics department, also a meteorologist, and I, representing geology and having nominal command, besides, 16 assistants, seven graduate students from Mischatonic, and nine skilled

mechanics. Of these 16, 12 were qualified aeroplane pilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabody at Wood and I. In addition, of course, our two ships, wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam, were fully manned. The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions, financed the expedition. Hence, our preparations were extremely thorough, despite the absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were loaded. We were marvelously well equipped for our specific purposes, and in all matters pertaining

to supplies, regiment, transportation, and camp construction, we profited by the excellent example of our many recent exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the unusual number in fame of these predecessors which made our own expedition, ample though it was, so little noticed by the world at large. As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2, 1930, taking a leisurely course down the coast, and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains,

J.B. Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and George Thorfenson, commanding the bark Miscatonic, both veteran whalers and Antarctic waters. As we left the inhabited world behind, the sun sank lower and lower in the north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62 degrees south latitude, we sighted our first icebergs, table-like objects with vertical sides. And just before reaching the Antarctic Circle, which we crossed on October 20th with appropriately quaint ceremonies,

we were considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worst rigors to come. On many occasions, the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly. These included a strikingly vivid mirage, the first I had ever seen, in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles. Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly packed, we regained open water at south latitude 67 degrees, east longitude 175 degrees.

On the morning of October 26th, a strong land blink appeared on the south, and before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain, which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent, and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty range, discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adair and sail down the east coast of Victoria. to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound at the foot of the volcano Erebus in south latitude 77 degrees nine minutes. The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy stirring, great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice,

and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible Antarctic wind, whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-scentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious, mnemonic, reason, seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Rorick, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly-fabled plateau of Ling, which occur in the dreaded necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul al-Harsarad.

I was rather sorry later on that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library. On the 7th of November, sight of the Western Range, having been temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island, and the next day described the cones of Mounts Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, and the long line of the Perry Mountains beyond. They're now stretched off to the east, the low, white line of the great ice barrier, rising perpendicularly to a height of 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation.

In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound, and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mount Erebus. The Scoriac Peak towered up some 12,700 feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama, while beyond it rose the white, ghost-like height of Mount Terror, 10,900 feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano. Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate assistants, a brilliant young fellow named Danforth,

pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope, remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source of Poe's image when he wrote seven years later of, The lavas that restlessly roll, their sulfurous currents down Yonik, and the ultimate climbs of the pole that grown as they roll, down Mount Yannick in the realms of the Boreal Pole. Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material

and had talked a good deal of Po. I was interested myself because of the Antarctic scene of Poe's only long story, the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pim. On the barren shore and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads 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 affected a difficult landing on Ross Island, shortly after midnight on the morning of the ninth, 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 aerial, aeroplane 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, Massachusetts. We hope to complete our work during a single Antarctic summer,

but if this proved impossible, we would winter on the Arkham, sending the Miss Catonic 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 Mount Arabis, our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island, and the singular speed with which Pabody'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 aeroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party, 20 men and 55 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 degrees or 25 degrees above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to rigors of this sort. The barrier camp was semi-permanent 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 exploration. flooring 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 cash and another permanent base on the Great Plateau from six to 700 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 non-stop 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. When 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 degrees and 84 degrees, 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 coastline. At last we were truly entering the white, eon-dead world of the ultimate south, and even as we realized it, we saw the peak of Mount Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of almost

15,000 feet. The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in latitude 86 degrees, seven minutes, east longitude 174 degrees, 23 minutes, and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various points, reached by our sledge trips and short aeroplane flights, are matters of history, as is the arduous and triumphant descent of Mount Nansen by Pabody and two of the graduate students, Gedney and Carroll, on December 13th through 15th.

We were some 8,500 feet above sea level, and when experimental drillings revealed solid ground only 12 feet down, through the snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the small melting apparatus, and sunk boers 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 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 Bird has since disproved the hypothesis. 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, crynoids, and such mollusks as lingulae 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 pierced 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 Pabody, Danforth, all six of the students, four mechanics, and I, flew directly over the South Pole in two of the Great Plains, 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 Donsanian 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 500 miles eastward, with all four exploring planes, and establish 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 while 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 aeroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and 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 lakes' strange and dogged insistence on a westward, or rather northwestward, prospecting trip before a radical shift to the new base. It seems 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 500 million to a thousand million years old. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of At the Mountains of Madness By H.P. Lovecraft This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker.

Chapter 2 Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of lakes 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 through 18th with Pobody and five others, marred by the loss of two dogs and an upset when crossing one of the great pressure ridges in the ice,

had brought up more and more of the archaian 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 North-Westward party despite Lake's plea for my geological advice. While they were gone, I would remain at the best of the best of the best of the best of the base with Pabody 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's sound, but this could wait temporarily. I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it unwise to be at any time without possible transportation, in an utterly tenetless world of eon long death. Lakes' sub-expedition into the unknown, as everyone will recall, sent out its own

reports from the shortwave transmitters on the plains, these being simultaneously picked up by our apparatus at the southern base and by the Arkham at McMurdo's sound, whence they were relayed to the outside world on wavelengths up to 50 meters. The start was May January 22nd at 4 a.m. And the first wireless message we received came only two hours later, when Lake spoke of descending and starting a small-scale ice melting and bore at a point some 300 miles away from us. Six hours after that, a second and very excited message told of the frantic beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft had been sunk and blasted, culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with several markings approximately like the one which had caused the original puzzlement. Three hours later, a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight in the teeth of a raw and piercing gale.

And when I dispatched a message of protest against further hazards, Lake replied curtly that his new specimens made any hazard worth taking. I saw that his excitement had reached the point of mutiny, and that I could do nothing to check this headlong risk of the whole expedition's success. But it was appalling to think of his plunging deeper and deeper into that treacherous and sinister white immensity of tempests and unfathomed mysteries, which stretched off for some 1,500 miles to the half-known, half-suspected coastline of Queen Mary and Knox lands. Then in about an hour and a half more came that doubly excited message from Lake's moving plain, which almost reversed my sentiments and made me wish I had accompanied the party. 10.5 p.m. On the wing, after snowstorm had spied mountain range ahead higher than any hitherto seen,

may equal Himalayas allowing for height of plateau, probable latitude 76 degrees, 15 minutes, longitude 113 degrees, 10 minutes east, reach as far as can see to right and left, suspicion of two smoking cones, all peaks, black and bare of snow, Gail blowing off them impedes navigation. After that, Pobody, the men and I, hung breathlessly over the receiver. Thought of this Titanic Mountain rampart, 700 miles away, inflamed our deepest sense of adventure,

and we rejoiced that our expedition, if not ourselves personally, had been its discoverers. And half an hour late called us again. Moulton's plane forced down on plateau and foothills, but nobody hurt and perhaps can repair, Shall transfer essentials to other three for return or further moves if necessary, but no more heavy plane travel needed just now. Mountains surpass anything in imagination, am going up scouting in Carroll's plane with all weight out. You can't imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must go over 35,000 feet.

Everest out of the running. Atwood to work out height with Theodolite while Carol and I go up. Probably wrong about cones, for formations look stratified. possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other stratum mixed in. Queer skyline effects. Regular sections of cubes cling to highest peaks. Whole thing marvelous in red-gold light of low sun, like land of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of untrodden wonder.

Wish you were here to study. Though it was technically sleeping time, not one of us listeners thought for a moment of retiring. It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo's Sound, where the supply cash and the Arkham were also getting the messages. For Captain Douglas gave out a call congratulating everybody on the important find, and Sherman, the cash operator, seconded his sentiments. We were sorry, of course, about the damaged aeroplane, but hoped it could be easily mended.

Then at 11 p.m. came another call from Lake. Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don't dare try really tall peaks in present weather, but shall later. Frightful work climbing, and hardgoing at this altitude, but worth it. Great range fairly solid, hence can't get any glimpses beyond. Main summits exceed Himalayas and very queer. Range looks like Precambrian slate, with plain signs of many other upheaved strata. Was wrong about volcanism.

Goes farther in either direction than we can see. Swept clear of snow above about 21,000 feet. Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides and rectangular lines of low vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Rorick's paintings. Impressive from distance Flew close to some, and Carol thought they were formed of smaller separate pieces,

but that is probably weathering. Most edges crumbled and rounded off as if exposed to storms and climate changes for millions of years. Parts, especially upper parts, seem to be of light-colored rock that any visible strata on slopes proper hints an evidently crystalline origin. Close-flying shows many cave mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square, or semicircular.

You must come and investigate. Think I saw rampart squarely on top of one peak. Heights seems about 30,000 to 35,000 feet. I'm up to 21,500 myself in devilish, gnawing cold. Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of caves, but no flying danger so far. From then on, for another half hour, Lake kept up a running fire of comment, and expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied that I would join him as soon as he could send a plane and that Pobody and I would work out the best gasoline plan, just where and how to concentrate our supply in view of the expedition's altered character. Obviously, Lake's boring operations as well as his aeroplane activities

would need a great deal delivered for the new base, which he was to establish at the foot of the mountains, and it was possible that the eastward flight might not be made after all this season. In connection with this business I called Captain Douglas, and asked him to get as much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the single dog team we had left there. A direct route across the unknown region between Lake and McMurdo Sound was what we really ought to establish. Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where Moulton's plane had been forced down, and where repairs had already progressed somewhat.

The ice sheet was very thin, with dark ground here and there visible, and he would sink some borings in blasts at that very point before making any slay. trips or climbing expeditions. He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and the queer state of his sensations at being in the leave, vast, silent pinnacles, whose ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at the world's rim. Atwood's theodolite observations had placed the height of the five tallest peaks,

at from 30,000 to 34,000 feet. The wind-swept nature of the terrain clearly disturbed lake, for it argued the occasional existence of prodigious gales, violent beyond anything we had so far encountered. His camp lay a little more than five miles from where the higher foothills abruptly rose. I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words, flashed across a glacial void of 700 miles, as he urged that we all hasten with the matter

and get the strange new region disposed of as soon as possible. He was about to rest now after a continuous day's work of almost unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and result. In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless, talk with Lake and Captain Douglas at their widely separated bases, and it was agreed that one of Lake's planes would come to my base for Pobody the five men and myself, as well as for all the fuel it could carry. The rest of the fuel question, depending on our decision about an Easterly trip, could wait a few days, since Lake had enough for immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually,

the old southern base ought to be restocked, but if we postponed the easterly trip, we would not use it till the next summer, and meanwhile Lake must send a plane to explore a direct route between his new mountains and McMurro's sound. Pabody and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as the case might be. If we wintered in the Antarctic, we would probably fly straight from Lake's base to the Arkham without returning to the spot. Some of our conical tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided to complete the job of making a permanent village. Owing to a very liberal tent supply, Lake had with him all that his base would need even after our arrival. I wirelessed that Pobody and I would be ready for the northwestward move

after one day's work and one night's rest. Our labors, however, were not very steady after 4 p.m. For about that time, Lake began sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day had started unpropitiously, since an aeroplane survey of the nearly exposed rock surfaces showed an entire absence of those arcan and primordial strata for which he was looking, and which formed so great a part of the colossal peaks that loomed up at a tantalizing distance from the camp. Most of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and Comanchean sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists, with now and then a glossy black outcropping, suggesting a hard and slaty coal. This rather discouraged Lake, whose plans all hinged on unearthing specimens more than 500 million years,

older. It was clear to him that in order to recover the archaic slate vein in which he had found the odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from these foothills to the steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves. He had resolved nevertheless to do some local boring as part of the expedition's general program. Hence, set up the drill and put five men to work with it while the rest finished settling the camp and repairing the damaged aeroplane. The softest visible rock, a sandstone about a quarter of a mile from the camp, had been chosen for the first sampling, and the drill made excellent progress

without much supplementary blasting. It was about three hours afterward, following the first really heavy blast of the operation, that the shouting of the drill crew was heard, and that young Gedney, the acting foreman, rushed into the camp with the startling news. They had struck a cave. Early in the boring, the sandstone had given place

to a vein of Comanchean limestone full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals, echinis, and spirifera, and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges and marine vertebrate bones. The latter, probably of tillios, sharks, and ganoids. This in itself was important enough, as affording the first vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet secured. But when shortly afterward the drillhead dropped through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and doubly intense wave of excitement spread among the act.

excavators. A good-sized blast had laid open the subterrain secret, and now, through a jagged aperture, perhaps five feet across and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers a section of shallow limestone hollowing worn more than 50 million years ago by the trickling groundwaters of a bygone tropic world. The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep, but extended off indefinitely in all directions, and had a fresh, slightly moving air, which suggested its membership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and floor were abundantly equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites, some of which met in columnar form, but important above all else was the vast deposit of shells

and bones, which in places nearly choked the passage. Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns and fungi and forests of tertiary, cycads, fan palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal specimens than the greatest paleontologists could have counted or classified in a year. Molluscs, crustacean armor, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals, great and small, known, and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp shouting, and no wonder, every other.

Everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting cold to where the tall Derek marked a newfound gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished eons. When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity, he scribbled a message in his notebook and had young Molton run back to the camp to dispatch it by wireless. This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones and ganoids, and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonts and thicodonts, great mossosaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armor plates, teradactyl teeth and wing bones, archaeopteryx, debris, myocene sharks' teeth, primitive bird skulls, and skulls, vertebrae and other bones of archaic mammals, such as paleotheres, ziphodons, dynoceroses, eohippe, oreodons, and titanotheres.

There was nothing as recent as a mastodon elephant, true camel, deer, or bovine animal. Hence, Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred, during the Oligocene age, and that the hollowed stratum had lain its present, dry, dead, and inaccessible state for at least 30 million years. On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life forms was singular in the highest degree. Though the limestone formation was on the evidence of such typical embedded fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchean and not a particle earlier, the free fragments in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto considered as peculiar to far older periods, even rudimentary fishes, mollusks, and corals, as remote as the Silurian, or Ordovician.

The inevitable inference was that in this part of the world there had been a remarkable and unique degree of continuity between the life of over 300 million years ago and that of only 30 million years ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene age when the cavern was closed was of course past all speculation. In any event, the coming of the frightful ice and the Pleistocene, some 500,000 years ago, a mere yesterday as compared to the age of this cavity, must have put an end to any of the primal forms which had locally managed to outlive their common terms. Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletin written and dispatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get back. After that, Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes, transmitting to me and to the Arkham for relaying to the outside world, the frequent postscripts which Lake sent him by a succession of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers will remember the excitement created among men of science by that afternoon's reports, reports which have finally led, after all these years, to the organization of that very stark weathermore expedition, which I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes.

I had better give the messages literally as like sent them, and as our base operator McTeague translated them from his pencil shorthand. Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone fragments from blasts. Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate, proving that source survived from over 600 million years ago to Comanchean times without more than moderate morphological changes and decrease in average size. Comanchean prints apparently more primitive or decadent, if anything, than older ones.

Emphasize importance of discovery in press. Will mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics. Joins up with my previous work and amplifies conclusions. Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that Earth has seen whole cycle or cycles of organic life before known one that begins with archaeozoic cells. was evolved and specialized not later than thousand million years ago when plant was young and recently uninhabitable for any life forms or normal protoplasmic structure. Question arises when, where, and how development took place. Later, examining certain skeletal fragments of large land and marine sorrians and primitive mammals, find singular local wounds or injuries to bony structure not attributable to any gnome predatory or carnivorous animal of any period.

Of two sorts, straight, penetrant boars and apparently hacking incisions, one or two cases of cleanly severed bone, not many specimens affected, am sending to camp for electric torches, will extend search area underground by hacking away stalactites. Still later, have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across and an inch and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation, greenish, but no evidences to place its period, has curious smoothness and regularity, shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage at inward angles

and in center of surface, small smooth depression in center of unbroken surface, arouses much curiosity as to source and weathering, probably some freak of water action. Carol, with magnifier, thinks he can make out additional markings of geologic significance, groups of tiny dots in regular patterns, dogs growing uneasy as we work, and seem to hate the soapstone, must see if it has any peculiar

odor, we'll report again when Mills gets back with light and we start on underground area. 10.15 p.m. Important discovery. Orendorf and Watkins, working underground at 9.45 with light, found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature, probably vegetable and less overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by minimal. salts, tough as leather, but astonishing flexibility retained in places, marks have broken off parts at ends and around sides, six feet into end, 3.5 feet central diameter, tapering to one foot at each end. Like a barrel with five bulging ridges in place of staves, lateral breakages as of thinnish stalks are at a quator in middle of these ridges. In furrow between ridges

are curious gross, combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans, all greatly damaged but one which gives almost seven-foot wing spread. Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth, especially fabled elder things in necronomicon. These wings seem to be membranous, stretched on framework of glandular tubing, apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at wing tips, ends of body shriveled,

giving no clue to interior or to what has been broken off there. Must dissect when we get back to camp. Can't decide whether vegetable or animal. Many features obviously of almost incredible primitiveness Have set all hands Cutting stalactites and looking for further specimens Additional scarred bones found But these must wait

Having trouble with dogs They can't endure the new specimen And would probably tear it to pieces If we didn't keep it at a distance from them 11.30 p.m. Attention Dyer Pobody Douglas Matter of highest

I might say transcendent importance Arkham must relate to Kingsport head station at once. Strange barrel growth is the archaian thing that left prints in rocks. Mills, Boudreau, and Fowler discover cluster of 13 more at underground point 40 feet from aperture, mixed with curiously rounded and configured soapstone fragments smaller than one previously found. Star-shaped, but no marks of breakage except at some of the points. Of organic specimens, ate apparently perfect with all appendages. have brought all to surface, leading off dogs to distance.

They cannot stand the things. Give close attention to description and repeat back for accuracy. Papers must get this right. Objects are eight feet long all over. Six foot, five-rigged barrel torso, 3.5 feet central diameter, one-foot end diameters. Dark, gray, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membranous wings of same color. Found, folded, spread out of furrows between ridges.

wing framework tubular or glandular of lighter gray with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical stave-like ridges are five systems of light gray flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso, but expansible to maximum length of over three feet, like arms of primitive cryoid. Single stalks, three inches diameter branch after six inches into five substocks, each of which branches after eight inches into five small tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of 25 tentacles.

At top of torso, blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray with gill-like suggestions holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head, covered with three-inch wiry scylia of various prismatic colors. Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point. slit an exact center of top probably breathing aperture. At end of each tube is spherical expansion, where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy red-irist globe,

evidently an eye. Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head, and end in sack-like swellings of same color, which upon pressure open to bell-shaped orifices, two inches maximum diameter, and lined with sharp white tooth-like projection. probable mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish head found folded tightly down,

tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility is surprising, despite vast toughness. At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterpoints of head arrangements exist. Bulbous, light gray, pseudo-neck, without gills suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement, Tough, muscular arms, four feet long and tapering from 7 inches diameter at base to about 2.5 at point. To each point is attached, small end of a greenish-five-veined membranious triangle, 8 inches long and 6 wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudo-foot, which has made prints in rocks from 1,000 million to 50 or 60 million years old. From inner angles of starfish arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from three inches diameter at base to one at tip, orifices at tips.

All these parts infinitely tough and leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort, marine or otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated muscularity. As found, all these projections tightly fold over pseuddered. neck and end of torso corresponding to projections at other end. Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but odds now favor animal. Probably represents incredibly advanced evolution of radiata without loss of certain primitive features.

Akinoderm resemblance is unmistakable despite local contradictory evidences. Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat, but may have use in water navigation. Cemetery is curiously vegetable-like, suggesting vegetables essentially up-and-down structure rather than animals for an aft structure. Fabulously early date of evolution, preceding even simplest archaan protozoa hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to origin. Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside Antarctic becomes inevitable. Dyer and Pabody have read Necronomicon and seen, Clark Ashton Smith's nightmare paintings based on text, and will understand when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all Earth life as jest or mistake.

Students have always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative treatment of very ancient tropical radiata, also like prehistoric folklore things, Wilmarth has spoken of, Cthulhu cult appendages, etc. Vast field of study opened, deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early Eocene period, judging from associated specimens. Massive stalagmites deposited above them. Hard work hewing out, but toughness prevented damage. State of preservation miraculous, evidently owing to limestone action.

No more found so far, but we'll resume search later. Job now to get 14 huge specimens to camp without dogs, which bark furiously and can't be trusted near them. With nine men, three left to guard the dogs, we ought to manage the three sledges fairly well, though wind is bad. Must establish plain communication with McMurdo's sound and began shipping material But I've got to dissect one of these things before we take any rest Wish I had a real laboratory here

Dyer better kick himself for having tried to stop my westward trip First the world's greatest mountains and then this If this last isn't the high spot of the expedition I don't know what is We're made scientifically Congrats Pobody on the drill that opened up the cave Now will Arkham please Repeat description. The sensations of Pobody and myself at receipt of this report were almost beyond description,

nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm. McTeague, who had hastily translated a few high spots as they came from the droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his shorthand version as soon as Lake's operator signed off. All appreciated the epic-making significance of the discovery, and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as the Arkham's operator had repeated back the descriptive parts is requested. And my example was followed by Sherman from his station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache,

as well as by Captain Douglas of the Arkham. Later as head of the expedition, I added some remarks to be relayed through the Arkham to the outside world. Of course, rest was an absurd thought amidst this excitement, and my only wish was to get to Lake's camp as quickly as I could.

It disappointed me when he sent word their rising mountain gale made early aerial travel impossible. But within an hour and a half, interest again rose to banish disappointment. Lake was sending more messages and told of the completely successful transportation of the 14 great specimens to the camp. It had been a hard pull, for the things were surprisingly heavy, but nine men had accomplished it very neatly. Now some of the party were hurriedly building a snow corral at a safe distance from the camp, to which the dogs could be brought for

greater convenience than feeding. The specimens were laid out on the hard snow near the camp, save for one on which Lake was making crude attempts at dissection. The dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected, for despite the heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the deceptively flexible tissues of the chosen specimen, a powerful and intact one, lost nothing of their more than leathery toughness. Lake was puzzled as to how he might make the requisite incisions

without violence, destructive enough to upset all the structural niceties he was looking for. He had, it is true, seven more perfect specimens, but these were too few to use up recklessly, unless the cave might later yield an unlimited supply. Accordingly, he removed the specimen and dragged in one which, though having remnants of the starfish arrangements at both ends, was badly crushed and partly disrupted along one of the great torso furrows.

Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocative indeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible, with instruments, hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the little that was achieved left us all awed and bewildered. Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no product of any cell growth science knows about. There had been scarcely any mineral replacement, and despite an age of perhaps 40 million years the internal organs were wholly intact. The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing's form of organization,

and pertained to some paleogene cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation. At first all that lake found was dry, but as the heated tent produced its thong effect, organic moisture of pungent and offensive odor was encountered toward the thing's uninjured side. It was not blood, but a thick, dark green fluid, apparently answering the same purpose. By the time Lake reached this stage, all 37 dogs had been brought to the still uncompleted corral near the camp, and even at that distance set up a savage barking and show of restlessness at the acrid, diffusive smell. Far from helping to place the strange entity, this provisional dissection merely deepened its

mystery. All guesses about its external members had been correct, and on the evidence of these one could hardly hesitate to call the thing animal, but internal inspection brought up so many vegetable evidences that Lake was left hopelessly at sea. It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base. Cursorily, one would say that its respiratory apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide, and there were odd evidences of air storage chambers and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two other fully developed breathing systems, gills and pores. Clearly it was amphibian and probably adapted to long airless hibernation periods as well.

vocal organs seemed present in connection with the main respiratory system, but they presented anomalies beyond immediate solution. Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable utterance, seemed barely conceivable, but musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly probable. The muscular system was almost preternaturally developed. The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast. Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects,

The thing had a set of ganglial centers and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialized development. Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced, and there were signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry cilia of the head, involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism. Probably it had more than five senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from any existing analogy. It must, like thought, have been a creature of keen sensitiveness and delicately. differentiated functions in its primal world, much like the ants and bees of today. It reproduced like the vegetable cryptogams, especially the teretophytes, having spore cases at the tips of the wings and evidently developing from a phallus or pro-thalus.

But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a radiant, but was clearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but had three-fourths of the essentials of animal structure. That it was marine in origin, its symmetrical contour and certain other attributes. clearly indicated, yet one could not be exact as to the limit of its later adaptations. The wings, after all, held a persistent suggestion of the aerial. How it could have undergone its tremendously complex evolution on a newborn Earth and time to leave prints in Archaean rocks was so far beyond conception as to make Lake whimsically recall the primal myths about great old ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted Earth life as a joke or mistake.

and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from outside told by a folklorist colleague in Miscatonics' English department. Naturally, he considered the possibility of the Pre-Cambrian Prince having been made by less evolved ancestor of the present specimens, but quickly rejected this too facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the older fossils. If anything, the later contours showed decadence rather than higher evolution. The size of the pseudo-feet had decreased, and the whole whole thing. morphology seemed coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs just examined

held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether, little could be said to have been solved, and Lake fell back on mythology for a provisional name, jocosely dubbing his finds, the elder ones. At about 2.30 a.m., having decided to postpone further work and get a little rest,

he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged from the laboratory tent, and studied the intact specimens with renewed interest. The ceaseless Antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissue as a trifle, so that the headpoints and tubes of two or three showed signs of unfolding, but Lake did not believe there was any danger of immediate decomposition in the almost sub-zero air. He did, however, move all the undisected specimens closer together and throw a spare tent over them in order to keep off the direct solar rays.

That would also help to keep their possible scent away from the dogs, whose hostile unrest was really becoming a problem even at their substantial distance, and behind the higher and higher snow walls which, an increased quota of the men were hastening to raise around their quarters. He had to wait down the corners of the tent cloth with heavy blocks 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 aeroplane 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 Pobody 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 10 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. End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This Libravox recording is in the public domain.

Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 3. None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning. For both the excitement of Lake's Discovery and the mountain 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. McTeague was awake at 10 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's 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 2 p.m. After 3 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 shortwave 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 Thorfinson, and I resolved to take steps toward investigation. The fifth airplane, which we had left at the McMurdo's 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 Gunnerson and Larson, took off at 7.30 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 aeroplane. without any line of bases, but no one drew back from what seemed like the plainest necessity.

We turned in at 2 o'clock for a brief rest after some preliminary loading of the plane, but we're up again in four hours to finish the loading and packing. At 7.15, January 25th, we started flying northwestward under McTeague's pilotage with 10 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, 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 54, of all that peace and balance. which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external nature and nature's laws. Thenceforth, 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, in which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could. The newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plain,

telling of our non-stop 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 Bird, 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 Larson was first to spy the jagged line of which-like cones and pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plain.

Despite our speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence. Hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off, invisible 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 fantasy 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, 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 ultra-dimensionality. 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 eon 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 skyline, regularities like clinging fragments of perfect huge. which Lake had mentioned in his messages, in which indeed justified his comparison with the dream-like suggestions of primordial temple ruins on cloudy Asian mountain tops so subtly and strangely painted by Rorick. There was indeed something hauntingly Rorick like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught sight of Victorialand, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of archaic resemblances of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Ling in the primal

writings mythologists have placed Ling 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-pleastocene origin for the fragmentary narcotic manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees of Sothagua were as alien to mankind as Sothagua itself. Lingu 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 archaicestocraties 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, and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrery. 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 table-like 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, needle-like spires and curious clusters of five. All of these fibril structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges, crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights. And the implied scale of the hole 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 in 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 seem to find it in 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 allusion 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 dizzingly up like a fearsome rampart of giants, their curious regularities, showing with startling clearness even without a field glass. We were over the lowest foothills now, and could see amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau a couple of darkish spots,

which we took to be lakes camp and boring. The higher foothills shot up between five and six miles away, forming a range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than Himalayan peaks beyond them. At length, ropes, the student who had relieved McTeague at the controls, began to head downward toward the left-hand dark spot whose size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTeague sent out the last uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our expedition. Everyone, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the rest of our Antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing

We sent a guarded report of the tragedy we found And reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole lake party By the frightful wind of the preceding day Or of the night before that Eleven known dead Young Gedny missing People pardoned our hazy lack of details Through realization of the shock

The sad event must have caused us And believed us when we explained That the mingling action of the wind Had rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable for transportation outside Indeed, I flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress, utter bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the truth in any specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in what we dared not tell, what I would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from nameless horrors. It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. The storm, with its fury of madly driven ice particles

must have been beyond anything our expedition had encountered before. One aeroplane shelter, all it seems had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate state, was nearly pulverized, and the derrick at the distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces. The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruised into a high polish, and two of the small tents were flattened, despite their snowbanking. wooden services left out in the blast were pitted and denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated. It is also true that we found none of the archaid biological objects

in a condition to take outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals from a vast tumbled pile, including several of the greenish soapstone fragments, whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots caused so many doubtful comparisons, and some fossil bones, among which were the most typical of the curiously injured specimens. None of the dogs survived.

Their hurriedly built snow enclosure near the camp being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though the greater breakage on the side next to the camp, which was not the windward one, suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic beast themselves. All three sledges were gone, we have tried to explain that the wind may have blown them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-melting machinery at the boring were too badly damaged to warrant salvage. So we used them to choke up that subtly disturbing gateway to the past which Lake had blasted. We likewise left at the camp the two most shaken up of the planes, since our surviving party had only four real pilots, Sherman, Danforth, Mcteague, and ropes,

and all with Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate. We brought back all the books, scientific equipment, and other incidentals we could find, though much was rather unaccountably blown away. spare tents and furs were either missing or badly out of condition. It was approximately 4 p.m. after wide plane cruising had forced us to give Gedney up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for relaying, and I think we did well to keep it as calm and non-committal as we succeeded in doing. The most we said about agitation concerned our dogs,

whose frantic uneasiness near the biological specimens was to be expected from poor Lake's accounts. We did not mention, I think, their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones and certain other objects in the disordered region. Objects including scientific instruments, aeroplanes, and machinery both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had been loosened, moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have harbored singular curiosity and investigativeness. About the fourteen biological specimens, we were pardonably indefinite. We said that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough was left of them to prove Lake's description wholly and impressively accurate.

It was hard work keeping our personal emotions out of this matter, and we did not mention numbers or say exactly how we had found those which we did find. We had by that time agreed not to transmit anything suggesting madness on the part of Lake's men, and it surely looked like madness to find six imperfect monstrosities, carefully buried upright and nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mound. punched over with groups of dots and patterns exactly like those on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to have been completely blown away. We were careful, too, about the public's general peace of mind.

Hence, Danforth and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the next day. It was the fact that only a radically lightened plane could possibly cross a range of such height, which mercifully limited that scouting tour to the two of us. On our return at 1 a.m., Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff upper lip. It took no persuasion to make him promise not to show our sketches and the other things we had brought away in our pockets, not to say anything more to the others than what we had agreed to relay outside,

and to hide our camera films for private development later on, so that part of my present story will be as new to Pobody, McTeague, ropes, Sherman, and the rest, as it will be to the world in general. Indeed, Danforth is closer mouth than I, for he saw, or thinks he saw, one thing he will not tell even me. As we all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent, a confirmation of Lake's opinion, that the Great Peaks are of Archaean slate and other very primal, crumpled strata, unchained, since at least Middle Comanchean times, a conventional comment on the regularity of the clean cube and rampart formations.

A decision that the cave mouths indicate dissolved calcareous veins, a conjecture that certain slopes and passes would permit of the scaling and crossing of the entire range by seasoned mountaineers, and a remark that the mysterious other side holds a lofty and immense super plateau, as ancient and unchanging as the mountains themselves, 20,000 feet in elevation, with grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin glacial layer, and with low gradual foothills between the general plateau surface and the sheer precipices of the highest peaks. This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of 16 hours, a longer time than our announced flying landing,

reconnoitering, and rock-collecting program called for to a long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions, and told truly of our landing on the farther foothills. Fortunately, our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough, not to tempt any of the others into emulating our flight. Had any tried to do that, I would have used every ounce of my persuasion to stop them, and I do not know what Danforth would have done. While we were gone, Pabody, Sherman, Ropes, McTeague, and Williamson had worked like beavers over Lake's two best planes, fitting them again for use despite the altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism. We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old, base as soon as possible, even though indirect, that was the safest way to work toward McMurdo's

sound, for a straight line, flight across the most utterly unknown stretches of the eon-dead continent would involve many additional hazards. Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our tragic decimation and the ruin of our drilling machinery, and the doubts and horrors around us, which we did not reveal, made us wish only to escape from this austral world of desolation and brooding madness as swiftly as we could. As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without further disasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next day, January 27th, after a swift, non-stop flight, and on the 28th we made McMurdo's sound in two laps, the one pause being very

brief and occasioned by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the ice shelf after we had cleared the great plateau. In five days more, the Arkham and Miscatonic, with all hands and equipment on board, were shaking clear of the thickening field ice and working up Ross Sea, with the mocking mountains of Victoria land looming westward against a troubled Antarctic sky, and twisting the winds wails into a wide-range musical piping, which chilled my soul to the quick. Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us, and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, a cursed realm, where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs, since matter first

writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust. Since our return, we have all constantly worked to discourage Antarctic exploration, and have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with splendid unity and faithfulness. Even young Danforth, with his nervous breakdown, has not flinched or babbled to his doctors. Indeed, as I've said, there is one thing he thinks he alone saw, which he will not tell even me, though I think it would help his psychological state

if he would consent to do so. It might explain and relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no more than the delusive aftermath of an earlier shock. That is the impression I gather after those rare, irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to me, things which he repudiates vehemently,

as soon as he gets a grip on himself, itself again. It will be hard work deterring others from the Great White South, and some of our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. We might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown. Lakes' reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused naturalists and paleontologists to the highest pitch, though we were sensible enough not to show the detached parts we had taken from the actual buried specimens, or our photographs of those specimens as they were found. We also refrained from showing the more puzzling of the scarred bones

and greenish soapstones, while Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or drew on the super plateau across the range, and the crumpled things we smoothed, studied in terror, and brought away in our pockets. But now that Stark Weathermore party is organizing, and with a thoroughness far beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the Antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last, even about that ultimate, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.

End of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This Libervox Recordings in the public domain. read by Ben Tucker Chapter 4 It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to Lake's camp and what we really found there, and to that other thing beyond the frightful mountain wall. I'm constantly tempted to shirk the details,

and to let hints stand for actual facts and ineluctible deductions. I hope I have said enough already to let me glide briefly over the rest, the rest that is, of the horror at the camp. I've told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged machinery, the varied uneasinesses of our dogs, the missing sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological specimens strangely sound in texture for all their structural injuries from a world 40 million years dead. I do not recall whether I mention that upon checking up the canine bodies we found one dog missing. We did not think much about that till later. Indeed, only Danforth and I have thought of it at all. The principal things I've been keeping back relate to the bodies

and to certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of rationale to the apparent chaos. At the time I tried to keep the men's minds off those points, for it was so much simpler, so much more normal to lay everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake's party. From the look of things, that demon mountain wind Must have been enough to drive any man mad

In the midst of this center of all earthly mystery and desolation. The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies, Men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict And were torn and mangled and fiendish In altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, Had in each case come from strangulation or laceration,

The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for the state of their ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within. It had been set some distance from the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish-archaean organisms, but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in that monstrous wind behind flimsy walls of insufficient height, they must have stampeded. Whether from the wind itself or from some subtle, increasing odor emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say. Those specimens, of course, had been covered with a tint cloth, yet the low Antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended to make the strangely sound and tough tissues of the things relax and expand.

Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth from over them and jostled them about in such a way that their more pungent olfactory qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity. But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I had better put squeamishness aside until the worst at last, though with a categorical statement of opinion, based on the first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and myself, that the then-missing Getney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found. I have said that the bodies were frightfully mingled.

Now I must add that some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded and inhuman fashion. It was the same with dogs and men, all the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed as by a careful butcher, and around them was a strange sprinkling of salt taken from the ravaged provision chests on the planes, which conjured up the most horrible associations. The thing had occurred in one of the crude aeroplane shelters from which the plane had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced all tracks which could have supplied any plausible theory.

Scattered bits of clothing, roughly slashed from the human incision subjects, hinted no clues. It is useless to bring up the half-impression of certain faint snow prints in one shielded corner of the ruined enclosure, because that impression human prints at all, but was clearly mixed up with all the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake had been giving throughout the preceding weeks. One had to be careful of one's imagination in the lee of those overshadowing mountains of madness. As I've indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing, in the end. When we came on that terrible shelter, we'd missed two dogs and two men, but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent which we entered after investigating the monstrous graves

had something to reveal. It was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the primal monstrosity had been removed from the improvised table. Indeed, we had already realized that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried things we had found, the one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful odor, must represent the collected sections of the entity, which Lake had tried to analyze. On and around that laboratory table were strewn other things, and it did not take long for us to guess that those things were the carefully, though oddly and inexpertly, dissected parts of one man and one dog.

I shall spare the feelings of survivors by omitting mention of the man's identity. Lakes' anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidences of their careful cleaning. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it we found a curious litter of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men, and the canine parts with the other thirty-five dogs. Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory table and on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated books scattered near it, We were much too bewildered to speculate. This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were equally perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured biological specimens,

the three sledges and certain instruments, illustrated technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches, and batteries, food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like, was utterly beyond sane conjecture. as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink blots on certain pieces of paper and the evidences of curious alien fumbling and experimentation around the plains and all other mechanical devices both at the camp and at the boring the dogs seem to abhorred this oddly disordered machinery then too there was the upsetting of the larder the disappearance of certain staples

and the jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely places The profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or spent, formed another minor enigma, as did the two or three tent cloths and fur suits, which we found lying about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings, conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations. The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies and the crazy burial of the damaged archaean specimens were all of a peace with this apparent disintegrative madness, in view of just such an eventuality as the present one, We carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane disorder at the camp,

and she'll use the prints to buttress our pleas against the departure of the proposed, Stark Weather More Expedition. Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and open the row of insane graves with five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds with their clusters of grouped dots to pour lakes' descriptions of the strange greenish soapstones. and when we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the great mineral pile we found the likeness very close indeed.

The whole general formation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably suggestive of the starfish head of the archaian entities, and we agreed that the suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitized minds of Lake's overwrought party. Our own first sight of the actual buried entities

formed a horrible moment and sent the imaginations of Pobody and myself back to some of the shocking primal men myths we had read and heard. We all agreed that the mere sight and continued presence of the things must have cooperated with the oppressive polar solitude and demon mountain wind and driving lakes party mad. For madness, centering in Gedney is the only possible surviving agent, was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken utterance was concerned. Though I will not be so naive as to deny that each of us may have harbored wild guesses,

which sanity forbade him to formulate completely. Sherman, Pobody, and McTeague made an exhaustive aeroplane cruise over all the surrounding territory in the afternoon, sweeping the horizon with field glasses in quest of Gedney and of the various missing things. But nothing came to light. The party reported that the Titan barrier range extended endlessly to right and left alike, without any diminution in height or central structure.

On some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations, were bolder and plainer, having doubly fantastic similitudes to Rouric-painted Asian hill ruins. The distribution of cryptical cave mouths on the black snow-denuded summits seemed roughly even as far as the range could be traced. In spite of all the prevailing horrors, we were left with enough sheer scientific zeal and adventurousness to wonder about the unknown realm beyond those mysterious mountains. As our guarded messages stated, we rested at midnight after our day of terror and bafflement,

but not without a tentative plan, for one or more range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with aerial camera and geologists' outfit, beginning the following morning. It was decided that Danforth and I try it first, and we awakened at 7 a.m. and tending an early trip, though heavy winds, mentioned in our brief bulletin to the outside world, delayed our start till nearly 9 o'clock. I've already repeated the non-committal story we told the men at camp and relayed outside after I returned 16 hours later. It is now my terrible duty to amplify this account by filling in the merciful blanks with hints of what we really saw in the hidden transmontane world, hints of the revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a nervous collapse. I wish he would add a really frank word about the thing which he thinks he alone saw,

even though it was probably a nervous delusion, and which was perhaps the last straw that put him where he is, but he is firm against that. All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed whispers about what set him shrieking as the plain soared back through the wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and tangible shock which I shared. This will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving elder horrors and what I disclose

be not enough to keep others from meddling with the inner and, Antarctic, or at least from prying too deeply beneath the surface of that ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and unhuman eon-cursed desolation, the responsibility for unnameable, and perhaps immeasurable evils will not be mine. Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabody in his afternoon flight and checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass in the range lays somewhat to the right of us, with inside of camp in about 23,000 or 24,000 feet above sea level. For this point then, we first headed in the lightened plain as we embarked on our flight of discovery. The camp itself on foothills, which sprang from a high continental plateau, was some 12,000 feet in altitude.

Hence the actual height increase necessary was not so vast as it might seem. Nevertheless, we were acutely conscious of the rarefied air and intense cold as we rose, for on account of visibility conditions we had to leave the cabin windows open. We were dressed, of course, in our heaviest furs. As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister, above the line of crevasse-riven snow and interstitual glaciers, we noticed more and more the curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes, and thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Rorick.

The ancient and wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all of Lake's bulletins, and proved that these hoary pinnacles had been towering up in exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in Earth's history, perhaps over 50 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 mountain-side tangle of regular queues. ramparts, and cave mouths, which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a field glass and took aerial photographs whilst Danforth drove,

and at times relieved him into controls, though my aviation knowledge was purely in amateurs in order to let him use the binoculars. We could easily see that much of the material of the things was a lightish, archaic 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 eons 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 their surrounding rock surface. The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Machu Picchu and the Andes, where 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 Carol.

How to account for such things, and this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange regularities, like the famous giant causeway in Ireland, but this stupendous range, despite Lake's original suspicion of smoking cones, was above all else non-volcanic and 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 tempted 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 crevices and other bad spots, it would not have been likely to deter the sledges of a scot, a shackleton, or a Munson. Some of the glaciers appeared to lead up to wind-beared 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 aesthetic association? A theme mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings and with archaic myths lurking and 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 23,570 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 the rampart exactly on top. It seemed to be half-lost in a queer Antarctic haze, such a haze, perhaps, as has 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 to its 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 a momentous divide

and over the unsampled secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth. End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 About the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. read by Ben Tucker Chapter 5 I think that both of us simultaneously cried out and 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 study 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 a desert. Perhaps we even half-thought the sight of 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 erhythmic stone masses, which reared their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than 40 or 50 feet deep at its thickest, and in places obviously thinner. The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of no natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here on a hellishly ancient table land fully 20,000 feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than 500,000 years ago, they're stretched, nearly to the visions 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 mountain sides 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 the 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 and stark, objective, and electable reality. That damnable portent had a material basis, after all. There had been some horizontal stratum of ice dust in the upper air,

and the 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 Mundy,

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 Eldridge primal myths that had so persistently haunted me since my first sight of this

dead Antarctic world. Of the demoniac plateau of Ling, of the Migo, or abominable snowmen of the Himalayas, of the narcotic manuscripts with their pre-human implications, of the Cothulukhult, of the Necronomicon, and of the hyperborean legends of formless Sag Thagua, and the worse than formless star-spon associated with that semi-entity.

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, for an interruption at the left of the past 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 10 to 150 feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from 5 to 10 feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone. Blocks in many cases as large as 4 by 6 by 8 feet, though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bedrock 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 suggested modern fortifications. The builders had made constant and expert use of the principle of the arch, and domes had probably existed in the city's heyday. The whole tangle was monstrously weathered,

and the glacial surface from which the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial debris. Where the glaciation was transparent, we could see the lower parts of the gigantic piles, and noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges, which connected the different towers at varying distances above the ground. On the exposed walls we could detect the scarred places where other and higher bridges of the same sort had existed,

closer inspection revealed countless, largeish windows, some of which were closed with shutters of a petrified material originally wood, though most gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion. Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless, and with uneven, though wind-rounded upper edges, whilst others of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model, or else protected by higher surrounding structures, preserved intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and pitting.

With the field glass we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural decorations and horizontal bands. Decorations including those curious groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones now assumed a vastly larger significance. In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice sheet deeply riven from various geologic causes. In other places, the stonework was worn down to the very level of the glaciation. One broad swath extending from the plateaus and the plateaus. interior to a cleft in the foothills, about a mile to the left of the pass we had traversed, was wholly free from buildings, and probably represented, we concluded, the course of some great river, which in tertiary times, millions of years ago,

had poured through the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly this was above all a region of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human penetration. Looking back to our sensations and recalling our dazardness at viewing this monstrous survival from eons we had thought pre-human, I can only wonder that we preserve the semblance of equilibrium which we did. Of course we knew that something, chronology, scientific theory, our own consciousness, was woefully awry, yet we kept enough poise to guide the plane, observe many things quite minutely and take a careful series of photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped, for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret,

to know what sort of beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a concentration of life could have had. For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary nucleus and center of some, archaic and unbelievable chapter of Earth's history, whose outward ramifications recalled only dimly in the most obscure and distorted myths had vanished utterly amid the chaos of terene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apdom. Here sprawled a paleogian megalopolis, compared with which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria, Comorium, and Azolderum, and Olitho

in the land of Lomar are recent things of today. Not even of yet, A megalopolis ranking with such whispered pre-human blasphemies as Volusia, Ralea, Ib, in the land of Minar, and the nameless city of Arabia, deserta. As we flew above that tangle of stark Titan towers, my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms of fantastic associations. Even weaving links betwixt this lost world and some of my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp. The plains fuel tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had been only partly filled. Hence, we now had to exert caution in our explorations. Even so, however, we covered

an enormous extent of ground, or rather air, after sweeping down to a level where the wind became virtually negligible. There seemed to be no limit to the mountain range or to the length of the frightful stone city which bordered its inner foothills. Fifty miles of flight in each direction showed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpse-like through the eternal ice. There were, though, some highly absorbing diversifications, such as the carvings on the canyon where that broad river had once pierced the foothills and approached its sinking place in the great range. The headlands at the stream's entrance had been boldly carved into cyclopean pylons, and something about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semi-remembrances.

in both Danforth and me. We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares, and noted various undulations in the terrain, where a sharp hill rose that was generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling stone edifice. But there were, at least, two exceptions. Of these latter, one was too badly weathered

to disclose what had been on the jutting eminence, while the other still bore a fantastic, conical monument, carved out of the solid rock and roughly resembling such things as the well-known snake tomb in the ancient valley of Petra. Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was not of infinite width, even though its length along the foothills seemed endless. After about 30 miles, the grotesque stone buildings began to thin out, and in ten more miles we came to an unbroken waste, virtually without signs of sentient artifice. The course of the river beyond the city seemed marked by a broad, depressed line,

while the land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness, seeming to slope slightly upward, as it receded in a mist hazed west. So far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an attempt at entering some of the monstrous structures would have been inconceivable. Accordingly, we decided to find a smooth place

on the foothills near our navigable pass, there grounding the plain and preparing to do some exploration on foot. Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with a scattering of ruins, low-flying soon disclosed an ample number of possible landing places, selecting that nearest to the pass, since our next flight would be across the Great Range and back to camp.

We succeeded about 12.30 p.m. in coming down on smooth, hard snowfield, wholly devoid of obstacles and well-adapted to a swift and favorable take-off later on. It did not seem necessary to protect the plain with a snow banking for so brief a time and in so comfortable in absence of high winds at this level. Hence we merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged And that the vital parts of the mechanism were guarded against the cold For our foot journey, we discarded the heaviest of our flying furs And took with us a small outfit consisting of pocket compass

Hand camera light provisions Voluminous notebooks and paper geologist hammer and chisel Specimen bags, coil of climbing rope and powerful electric torches with extra batteries This equipment having been carried in the plane on the chance that we might be able to affect a landing, take ground pictures, make drawings, and topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens from some bare slope outcropping or mountain cave. Fortunately, we had a supply of extra paper to tear up, place in a square specimen bag, and use on the ancient principle of hare and hounds for marking our course in any interior mazes we

might be able to penetrate. This had been brought in case we found some cave system, with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the usual rock-chipping method of trailblazing. Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously. True, we had become visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks, yet the prospect of actually entering primordial walls, reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years ago, before any known race of men could have existed, was nonetheless awesome

and potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality. Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual, both Danforth and I found ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to our lot. It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin, worn level with the snow. While ten or fifteen rods farther on, there was a huge, roofless rampart, still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline, and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet.

For this ladder we headed. And when at last we were able actually to touch its weathered cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten. eons normally closed to our species. This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps 300 feet from point to point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging six by eight feet in surface. There was a row of arched loopholes or windows about four feet wide and five feet high, spaced quite symmetrically along the points of the star, and at its inner angles, and with the bottoms about four feet from the glaciated surface. Looking through these, we could

see that the masonry was fully five feet thick, that there were no partitions remaining within, and that there were traces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior walls. Facts we had indeed guessed before when flying low over this rampart and others like it. Though lower parts must have originally existed, all traces of such things were now wholly obscured by the deep layer of ice and snow at this point. We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher the nearly effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated floor. Our orientation flights had indicated that many buildings in the city proper were less ice-choked, and that we might perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading to the true ground level

if we entered those structures still roofed at the top. Before we left the rampart, we photographed it carefully, and studied its mortarless cyclopean masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished that Pabody were present, for his engineering knowledge might have helped us guess how such titanic blocks could have been handled in that unbelievably remote age when the city and its outskirts were built up. The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind shrieking vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the background,

was something whose smallest details will always remain engraved on my mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any human beings, but Danforth and me conceive such optical effects. Between us and the churning vapors of the west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers, its utre and incredible forms impressing us afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage and solid stone, and were it not for the photographs, I would still doubt that such a thing could be. The general type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart we had examined, but the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban manifestations were past all description.

Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its infinite bazaarery, endless variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical forms for which a Euclid could scarcely find a name, cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken columns and curious groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness. As we drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the ice sheet and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that connected the crazily sprinkled structures at various heights. Of orderly streets there seemed to be none,

the only broad open swath being a mile to the left, where the ancient river had doubtless flowed through the town into the mountains. Our field glasses showed the external horizontal, of nearly effaced sculptures and dot groups to be prevalent, and we could half imagine what the city must once have looked like, even though most of the roofs and tower tops had necessarily perished. As a whole, it had been a complex tangle of twisted lanes and alleys, all of them deep canyons, and some little better than tunnels because of the overhanging masonry or overarching bridges. Now, outspread below us, it loomed like a dream fantasy against a westward mist, through whose northern

end the low-reddish Antarctic sun of early afternoon was struggling to shine. And when for a moment that sun encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary shadow, the effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict. Even the faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind and the great mountain passes behind us took on a wilder note of purposeful malignity. The last stage of our descent to the town was unusually steep and abrupt, and a and a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led us to think that an artificial terrace had once existed there. Under the glaciation, we believe there must be a flight of steps, or its equivalent.

When at last we plunged into the labyrinthine town itself, clambering over fallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy and began making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp, which I resented all the more because I could not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid survival from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his imagination too, for in one place where a debris littered alley turned a sharp corner, he insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings, which he did not like.

whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle imaginary sound from some undefined point. A muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that of the wind and the mountain caves, yet somehow disturbingly different. The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape, and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place.

Nevertheless, our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead, and we mechanically carried out our program of chipping specimens from all the different rock types represented in the masonry. We wished a rather full set in order to draw better conclusions regarding the age of the place. Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to date from later than the Jurassic and Comanchean periods, nor was any piece of stone in the entire place of a greater recency than the Pliocene age. In stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a death which had reigned at least 500,000 years,

and in all probability, even longer. As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight, we stopped at all available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities. Some were above our reach, whilst others led only into ice-choked ruins as unroofed and barrens, as the rampart on the hill. One, though, spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless abyss without visible means of descent.

Now and then we had a chance to study the petrified wood of a surviving shutter, and were impressed by the fabulous antiquity implied in the still discernible grain. These things had come from mesozoic gymnosperms and conifers, especially Cretaceous siads. And from fan palms and early angiosperms of plainly tertiary date,

Nothing definitely later than the Pliocene could be discovered. In the placing of these shutters, whose edges showed the former presence of queer and long-vanished hinges, usage seemed to be varied, some being on the outer and some on the inner side of the deep embrasures. They seem to have become wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of their former and probably metallic fixtures and fastenings. After a time we came across a row of windows, in the bulges of a colossal five-rigged cone of undone, damaged apex, which led into a vast well-preserved room with stone flooring. But these were too high in the room to permit of descent without a rope. We had a rope with us, but did not wish to bother with this 20-foot drop unless obliged to,

especially in this thin plateau air, where great demands were made upon the heart action. This enormous room was probably a hall or concourse of some sort, and our electric torches showed bold, distinct, and potentially startling sculptures arranged round the walls and broad horizontal bands, separated by equally broad strips of conventional arabesques. We took careful note of this spot, planning to enter here unless a more easily gained interior were encountered. Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished, an archway about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end of an aerial bridge, which had spanned an alley about five feet above the present level of glaciation. These archways, of course, were flush with upper story floors, and in this space,

case, one of the floor still existed. The building, thus accessible, was a series of rectangular terraces on our left facing westward. That across the alley where the other archway yawned was a decrepit cylinder with no windows, and with a curious bulge about ten feet above the aperture. It was totally dark inside, and the archway seemed to open on a well of a limitable emptiness. Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly easy, yet for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the long-wished chance. For though we had penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery, it required fresh resolution to carry us actually inside a complete

and surviving building of a fabulous elder world, whose nature was becoming more and more hideously plain to us. In the end, however, we made the plunge, and scrambled up over the rubble into the gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate slabs, and seemed to form the outlet of a long high core, corridor with sculptured walls. Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and realizing the probable

complexity of the nest of apartments within, we decided that we must begin our system of heron-hound trailblazing. Hitherto our compasses, together with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain range between the towers and our rear, have been enough to prevent our losing our way. But from now on, the artificial substitute would be necessary. Accordingly, we reduced our extra paper to shreds of suitable size. placed these in a bag to be carried by Danforth, and prepared to use them as economically as safety would allow. This method would probably gain us immunity from straying,

since there did not appear to be any strong air currents inside the primordial masonry. If such should develop, or if our paper supply should give out, we could, of course, fall back on the more secure, though more tedious and retarding method of rock chipping. Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible to guess without a trial. The close and frequent connection of the different buildings made it likely that we might cross from one to another on bridges underneath the ice, except where impeded by local collapses and geological riffs.

For very little glaciation seems to have entered the massive constructions. Almost all the areas of transparent ice had revealed the submerged windows as tightly shuttered, as if the town had been left in that uniform state until the glacial sheet came to crystallize the lower part for all succeeding time. Indeed, one gained a curious impression that this place had been deliberately closed and deserted in some dim bygone eon, rather than overwhelmed by any sudden calamity or even gradual decay. Had the coming of the ice been foreseen, and had a nameless population left en masse to seek a less doomed abode, the precise physiographic conditions attending the formation of the formation of the

ice sheet at this point would have to wait for later solution. It had not very plainly been a grinding dive. Perhaps the pressure of accumulated snows had been responsible, and perhaps some flood from the river, or from the bursting of some ancient glacial dam in the great range, had helped to create the special state now observable. Imagination could conceive almost anything in connection with this place. End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This Libervox recording is in the public domain.

Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 6 It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings inside that cavernous Eon dead honeycomb of primal masonry, that monstrous layer of elder secrets, which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs to the tread of human feet. This is especially true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings.

Our flashlight photographs of those carvings will do much toward proving the truth of what we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had not a larger film supply with us. As it was, we made crude notebook sketches of certain salient features, after all our films were used up. The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness, and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the lower levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthing complexity, involving curiously irregular differences and floor levels, characterized the entire arrangement, and we should certainly have been lost at the very outset, but for the trail of torn paper left behind us. We decided to explore the more decrepit upper parts, first of all,

hence climbing aloft in the maze for a distance of some 100 feet, to where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the polar sky. Ascent was affected over the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps or inclined plains, which everywhere served in lieu of stairs. The rooms we encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes, It might be safe to say that their general average was about 30 by 30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height, though many larger apartments existed.

After thoroughly examining the upper regions and the glacial level, we ascended story by story into the submerged part, where, indeed, we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages, probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular building, the cyclopean massiveness and giganticism of everything about, us became curiously oppressive, and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, dimensions, and constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon realized from what the carvings revealed that this monstrous city was many million years old.

We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous balancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the function of the arch was clearly. much relied on. The rooms we visited were wholly bear of all portable contents, a circumstance which sustained our belief in the city's deliberate desertion. The prime decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture, which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width, given over to geometrical arabesques. There were exceptions to this rule of arrangement, but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often, however, a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly

patterned groups of dots would be sunk along one of the arabesque bands. The technique we soon saw was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved to the highest degree of civilized mastery, though utterly alien in every detail to any known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution, no sculpture I have ever seen could approach it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing vividness, despite the bold scale of the carvings. Whilst the conventional designs were marvels of skillful intricacy, the arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical principles, and were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based on the quantity of five. The pictorial bands followed a highly formalized tradition, and involved a

peculiar treatment of perspective, but had an artistic force. that moved us profoundly notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods. Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross-section, with two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will probably find its closest analog in certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists. The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines,

whose depth on unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot groups appeared, evidently as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language in alphabet, the depression of the smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots, perhaps a half inch more. The pictorial bands were in counter-sunk low relief, their background being depressed about two inches from the original wall surface. In some specimens, marks of a former coloration could be detected,

though for the most part the untold eons had disintegrated and banished any pigments, which may have been applied. The more one studied the marvelous technique, the more one admired the things. Beneath their strict conventionalization, one could grasp the minute and accurate observation and graphic skill of the artists, and indeed the very conventions themselves, served to symbolize and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated. We felt, too, that, besides these recognizable excellences, there were others lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions. Certain touches here and there gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another mental and emotional background

and a fuller or different sensory equipment might have made of profound and poignant significance to us. The subject matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the vanished epoch of their creation, and contained a large proportion of evident history. It is this abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal race, a chance circumstance operating through coincidence miraculously in our favor, which made the carvings so awesomely informative to us, and which caused us to place their photography and transcription above all other considerations. In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was very different,

by the presence of maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs on an enlarged scale. These things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the pictorial freezes and dotos, and hinting at what the whole revealed, I can only hope that my account will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of those who believe me at all. It would be tragic, if anywhere to be allured to that realm of death and horror but the very warning meant to discourage them. Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive 12-foot doorways, both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks, elaborately carved and polished, of the actual shutters and doors.

All metal fixtures had long ago vanished, but some of the doors remained in place, and had to be forced aside as we progressed from room to room. Window frames, with odd transparent panes, mostly elliptical, survived here and there, though in no considerable quantity. There were also frequent niches of great magnitude, generally empty, but once in a while containing some bizarre object carved from green soapstone, which was either broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant removal.

Other apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical facilities, heating, and the like, of a sort suggested in many of the carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had some. sometimes been inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors were also paved with such tiles, though plain stonework predominated. As I have said, all furniture and other movables were absent, but the sculptures gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these tomb-like echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet, the floors were generally thick with detritus, litter, and debris,

but farther down this condition decreased. and some of the lower chambers and corridors there was little more than gritty dust or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or collapses had occurred, the lower levels were as littered as the upper ones. A central court, as in other structures we had seen from the air, saved the inner regions from total darkness, so that we seldom had to use our electric torches in the upper rooms, except when studying sculpture details.

Below the ice cap, however, the twilight deepened, and in many parts of the tangled ground level there was an approach to absolute blackness. To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated this eon silent maze of unhuman masonry, one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and impressions. The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person. But added to these elements were the recent, unexplained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too soon affected by the terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment we came upon a perfect section of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it took only a brief study to give us the hideous truth, a truth which it would

be naive to claim Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now be no further merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago. When man's ancestors were primitive archaic mammals and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steps of Europe and Asia. We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted, each to himself, that the omnipresence of the five-pointed motif meant only some cultural,

or religious exaltation of the archaian natural object, which had so patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness, as the decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt, the Scarabaeus, those of Rome, the wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribes, some chosen totem animal. But this lone refuge was now stripped from us, and we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking realization

in which the reader of these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in black and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary. The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objects, but the builders of this city were wise and old, and had left certain traces and rocks,

even then laid down well-nigh a thousand million years. Rocks laid down before the true life of Earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells. Rocks laid down before the true life of Earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths, which things like the narcotic manuscripts and the necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the great old ones that had filtered down from the stars when Earth was young, the beings whose substance and alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had never bred. And to think that only the day before, Danforth and I had actually looked

upon fragments of their millennially fossilized substance, and that poor lake in his party had seen their complete outlines. It is, of course, impossible for me to relate in proper order the stages by which we picked up what we know of that monstrous chapter of prehuman life. life. After the first shock of the certain revelation, we had to pause a while to recuperate, and it was fully three o'clock before we got started on our actual tour of systematic research. The sculptures in the building we entered were of relatively late date, perhaps two million years ago, as checked up by geological, biological, and astronomical features, and embodied an art which would be called decadent in comparison with that of specimens we found in older buildings

after crossing bridges under the glacial sheet. One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back 40 or possibly even 50 million years, to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous, and contained Boz reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one tremendous exception that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed, the oldest domestic structure we traversed.

Were it not for the support of those flashlights, soon to be made public, I would refrain from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a madman. Of course, the infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale, representing the pre-terrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets and in other galaxies and in other universes, can readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves. Yet such parts sometimes involve designs and diagrams,

so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics, in astrophysics, that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge when they see the photographs I shall publish. Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fraction of any connected story, nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages of that story in their proper order. Some of the vast rooms were independent units, so far as their designs were concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss below even the ancient ground level, a cavern perhaps 200 feet square and 60 feet high,

which had almost undoubtedly been an educational center of some sort. There were many provoking repetitions of the same material in different rooms and buildings, since certain chapters of experience and certain summaries or phrases of racial history had evidently been favorites with different decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same theme proved useful in settling debatable points and filling in gaps. I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal. Of course, we even now have only the barest outline, and much of that was obtained later on from a study of the photographs and sketches we made. It may be the effect of this later study, the revived memories and vague impressions acting in conjunction with his general

sensitiveness, and with that final supposed horror glimpse whose essence he will not reveal even to me, which has been the immediate source of Danforth's present breakdown. But it had to be, for we could not issue our warning intelligently without the fullest possible information, and the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity. Certain lingering influences in that unknown Antarctic world of disordered time and alien natural law make it imperative that further exploration be discourage. End of Chapter 6. Chapter 7 of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This Librevox recording is in the public domain.

Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 7 The full story, so far as deciphered, will shortly appear in an official bulletin of Miss Gatonic University. Here I shall sketch only the salient highlights in a formless, rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the sculptures told. of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless Earth out of cosmic space. Their coming, and the coming of many other alien entities, such as at certain times, embark upon spatial pioneering. They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast

membranous wings, thus oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. They had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of energy. Evidently, their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed man's today, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanized life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness of organization and simplicity,

of natural wants, made them peculiarly able to live on a high plane without the more specialized fruits of artificial manufacture, and even without garments except for occasional protection against the elements. It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they first created earth life, using available substances according to long-known methods. The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic entities. They had done the same thing on other planets, having men. manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses, capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence,

and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were without a doubt what Abdul Ahazared whispered about as the Shogoths and his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existing on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain, an alkaloidal herb. When the star-headed old ones on this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shogoths,

they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes, extirpating any whose presence became troublesome. With the aid of the Shogoths, whose expansions could be made to lift prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing labyrinths of stone,

not unlike those which later rose on land. Indeed, the highly adaptable old ones had lived much on land in other parts of the universe and probably retained many traditions of land construction. As we studied the architecture of all these sculptured paleogean cities, including that whose eon-dead corridors we were even then traversing, we were impressed by a curious coincidence, which we have not yet tried to explain even to ourselves.

The tops of the buildings, which in the actual city around us had of course been weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, were clearly displayed in the vase reliefs, and showed vast clusters of needle-like spires, delicate finials, on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin horizontal scalloped discs, capping cylindrical shafts. This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous mirage, cast by a dead city whence such skyline features, had been absent for thousands and tens of thousands of years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes across the unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached poor lake's ill-fated camp. Of the life of the old ones, both under the sea and after part of them migrated to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had continued the fullest use of the

eyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the usual way. The writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths, though they used a curious phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their vision with obscure special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their heads. Senses which rendered all the old ones partly independent of light and emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and writing had changed curiously during the descent, embodying certain apparently chemical coating processes,

probably to secure phosphorescence, which the Baza reliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming, using the lateral crinoid arms, and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles containing the pseudo feet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets

of their fan-like folding wings. On land they locally used the pseudo-feet, but now and then flew to great heights or over long distances with their wings. The many slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate, flexible, strong, and accurate, and muscular, nervous coordination, ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations. The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressures of the deepest sea bottoms appeared powerless to harm them.

very few seemed to die at all except by violence, and their burial places were very limited. The fact that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts and Danforth and me which made a fresh pause in recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied by means of spores, like vegetable to writ of heights as Lakeet suspected, but owing to their prodigious toughness and longevity and consequent lack of replacement needs, they did not encourage the large-scale development of new Prothali, except when they had new regions to colonize.

The young matured swiftly and received an education evidently beyond any standard we can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions, which I shall describe more fully in my coming monograph. These varied slightly, according to sea or land residents, but had the same foundations and essentials, Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances, they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food.

They ate uncooked marine life under the sea, but cooked their vines on land. They hunted game and raised meat herds, slaughtering with sharp weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resisted all ordinary temperatures marvelously, and in their natural state could live in water down to freezing. When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however, nearly a million years ago, the land dwellers had to resort to special measures, including artificial heating, until at last the deadly cold appears to have driven them back into the sea.

For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legend said, they had absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating, breathing, or heat conditions. But by the time of the great cold, they had lost track of the method. In any case, they could not have prolonged the artificial state indefinitely. without harm. Being non-parrying and semi-vegetable and structure, the old ones had no biological basis for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed to organize large households on the principles of comfortable space utility, and, as we deduced from pictured occupations and diversions of co-dwellers,

congenial mental association. In furnishing their homes, they kept everything in the center of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. lighting, in the case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a device probably electrochemical in nature. Both on land and underwater they used curious tables, chairs, and couches like cylindrical frames, for they rested and slept upright with folded down tentacles, and racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books. Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no certainties in this regard

could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There was extensive commerce, both low and between different cities. Certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, served as money. Probably the smaller of the various greenish soapstones found by her expedition were pieces of such currency. Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock-raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also practiced, travel was very frequent, but permanent migration seemed relatively rare, except for the vast colonizing movements by which the race expanded. For personal locomotion, no external aid was used, since in land, air, and water movement alike, the old ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for speed.

Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden, Shogoths under the sea, and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence. These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms, animal and vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aerial, were the products of unguided evolution acting on life cells, man. 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 vague simeon 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 paleontology. The persistence with which the old ones survived various geologic changes and convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of miraculous. Though fewer none of their first city seemed to have remained beyond the archaicane 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 underwater, with stone cities scattered farther and farther from the Antarctic as eons

past. 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 displayed this landmass as cracking and drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the theories of continental drift, lately advanced by Taylor, Wagoner, and Jolie. 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 pre-human 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 in 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 one civilization, and all the discoverable 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 Relya, 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 of my coming monograph that some archaeologist makes systematic borings with Pabody'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 Shogoths, 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 Shogoths 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 semi-stable brain, whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition

echoed the will of the old ones without always obeying it. Sculptured images of these Shogoths 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 15 feet in diameter of a sphere. They had, however, a constant shifting shape in 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 150 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 Shogoths 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 Shogoths 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 Shogoths 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-fungus, half-crustation creatures from a planet identifiable as the remote and recently discovered Pluto. Creatures undoubtedly the same as those figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered in the Himalayas as the Migo or abominable snowmen.

To fight these beings, the old ones attempted for the first time since their Terene 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 Migo 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 Migo seemed 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 seemed, 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 spacetime continuum, whereas the first sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath. All this, of course, assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed 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 cities 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 tailors of tailors. Wegener and Jolie, that all the continents are fragments of an original Antarctic landmass, which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower surface, an hypothesis suggested by such things as the complementary outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up,

received striking support from this uncanny source. Maps evidently showing the carboniferous world of a hundred million or more years ago, displayed significant riffs and chasms, destined later to separate Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe, then the Volusia of hellish primal legend, Asia, the Americas, and the Antarctic continent. Other charts, and most significantly one in connection with the founding 50 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 Pleiocene Age, The approximate world of today 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 Grahamland. In the Carboniferous map, the whole globe, ocean floor and rifted landmass 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 Pleiocene specimen showed no land-city is except. except on the Antarctic continent and the tip of South America, nor any ocean cities north of the 50th parallel of South latitude. Knowledge and interest in the northern world,

save for a study of coastlines 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 upthrust 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 aerial survey, there were reputed to be preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottomed city,

which were thrust up to light after long epochs in the course of the general crumpling of strata. End of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 8. Naturally, Danforth and I studied with a 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, and 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 neighboring rift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship, carrying the story of the region, much beyond the period of the Pleocene map, whence we derived our last general glimpse of the pre-human world. This was the last place we examined in detail, since what we found there gave us a fresh, immediate objective.

Certainly we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of Earth's globe. Of all existing lands, it was infinitely the most ancient, and the conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Ling, which even the mad author of the Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss. The great mountain chain was tremendously long, starting as a low range at Lutpold land on the coast of Weddell Sea, and virtually crossing the entire continent. The really high part stretched in a mighty arbor. arc from about latitude 82 degrees, east longitude 60 degrees, to latitude 70 degrees, each longitude 115 degrees. With its concave side toward our camp and its seaward end in the region of that long

ice-locked coast, whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mosson at the Antarctic Circle, yet even more monstrous exaggerations of nature seemed disturbingly close at hand, I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the sculptures forbid me to say that they are earth highest. That grim honor is beyond doubt reserved for something which half the sculptures hesitated to record at all, whilst others approached it with the obvious repugnance and trepidation. It seems that there was one part of the ancient land, the first part that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon and the old ones had seeped down from the stars, which had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil.

Cities built there had crumbled before their time, and had been found suddenly deserted. Then when the first great earth buckling had convulsed, the region in the Comanchean age, a frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling den and chaos, and earth had received her loftiest and most terrible mountains. If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have been much over 40,000 feet high, radically vaster than even the shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended, it appeared, from about latitude 70-70,

degrees, east longitude 70 degrees to latitude 70 degrees, east longitude 100 degrees, less than 300 miles away from the dead city, so that we would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim western distance, had it not been for that vague opalescent haze. Their northern end must likewise be visible from the long Antarctic Circle coastline at Queen Maryland. Some of the old ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to those mountains, but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyond. No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the emotions conveyed in the carvings, I prayed that none ever might. There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them. Queen Mary and Kaiser Willem lands, and I think heaven no one has been able to land and climb those hills.

I am not as skeptical about old tales and fears as I used to be, and I do not laugh now at the pre-human sculptor's notion that lightning-pulled paused meaningfully now and then at each of the brooding crests, and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those terrible pinnacles all through the long polar night. There might be a very real and very monstrous meaning in the old neonic whispers about Gaddaf in the cold waste. But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange,

even if less namelessly accursed. Soon after the founding of the city, the great mountain range became the seat of the principal temples, and many carvings showed what grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky, where now we saw only the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts. In the course of ages the caves had appeared and had been shaped into adjuncts of the temples. With the advance of still later epochs, all the limestone veins of the region were hollowed out by groundwaters, so that the mountains, the foothills, and the plains below them were a veritable network of connected caverns and galleries.

many graphic sculptures told of explorations deep underground and of the final discovery of the Stygian sunless sea that lurked at Earth's bowels. This vast knighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains and which had formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones range and flowed beside that chain into the Indian Ocean between Bud and Totten lands on Wilk's coastline.

Little by little it had eaten away the limestone hill base at its turning, till at last its sapping currents reached the caverns of the groundwaters and joined with them in digging a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk emptied into the hollow hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry. Much of the later city as we now found it had been built over that former bed. The old ones, understanding what had happened, and exercising their always keen artistic scents, had carved into ornate pylons those headlands.

of the foothills where the great stream began its descent into eternal darkness. This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly the one whose extinct course we had seen in our aeroplane survey. Its position in different carvings of the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stages of the region's age-long eon-dead history, so that we were able to sketch a hasty but careful map of the salient features. squares, important buildings, and the like, for guidance and further explorations. We could soon reconstruct and fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was a million,

or ten million, or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures told us exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant tertiary vegetation had looked like. It must have had a marvelous and mystic beauty, and as I thought of it I almost forgot the clammy sense of sense of sinister oppression, with which the city's in human age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness and glacial twilight had choked and weighed on my spirit. Yet according to certain carvings, the denizens of that city had themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror, for there was a

sombre and recurrent type of scene in which the old ones were shown in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object, never allowed to appear in the design, found in the Great River and indicated as having been washed down through waving, vine-draped, scycad forests from those horrible westward mountains. It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that we obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity, leading to the city's desertion. Undoubtedly, there must have been many sculptures of the same age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and aspirations of a stressful and uncertain period. Indeed, very certain evidence of the existence of others came to us shortly afterward. But this was the first and only set we directly encountered. We meant to look farther later on, but as I have said, immediate conditions dictated another present objective.

There would, though, have been a limit, for after all hope of a long future occupancy of the place had perished among the old ones. There could not have been but a complete cessation of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming of the Great Cold, which once held most of the earth enthrall, and which has never departed from the ill-fated poles. The Great Cold, that at the world's other extremity, put an end to the fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea. Just when this tendency began in the Antarctic, it would be hard to say in terms of exact years. Nowadays, we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at a distance of about 500,000 years from the present. but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork,

but it is quite likely that the decadent sculptures were made considerably less than a million years ago, and that the actual desertion of the city was complete, long before the conventional opening of the Pleistocene 500,000 years ago, as reckoned in terms of the Earth's whole surface. In the decadent sculptures, there were signs of thinner vegetation everywhere, and of a decreased country life on the part of the old ones. Heating devices were shown in the houses, and winter travelers were repressed as muffled in protective fabrics.

Then we saw a series of cartouches, the continuous band arrangement being frequently interrupted in these late carvings, depicting a constant growing migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmth, some fleeing to cities under the sea off the faraway coast, and some clambering down through networks of limestone caverns and the hollow hills to the neighboring black abyss of subterrain waters. In the end, it seems to have been the neighboring abyss which received the greatest colonization. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional sacredness of this especial region,

but may have been more conclusively determined by the opportunities it gave for continuing the use of the great temples on the honeycombed mountains, and for retaining the vast land city as a place of summer residence and base of communication with various minds. The linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by means of several gratings and improvements along the connecting routes, including the chiseling of numerous direct tunnels

from the ancient metropolis to the black abyss, sharply down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew, according to our most thoughtful estimates, on the guide map we were compiling. It was obvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a reasonable exploring distance of where we were, both being on the mountainward edge of the city, one less than a quarter mile toward the ancient river course,

and the other perhaps twice that distance in the opposite direction. The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places, but the old ones built their new city underwater, no doubt because of its greater certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears to have been very great, so that the earth's internal heat could ensure its habitability for an indefinite period. The beings seemed to have had no trouble in adapting themselves to part-time, and eventually, of course, whole-time residents underwater, since they had never allowed their gill systems to atrophy. There were many sculptures which showed how they had always frequently visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually bathed on the deep bottom of their great river.

The darkness of inner earth could likewise have been no deterrent to erase accustomed to long Antarctic nights. Decadent, though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings had a truly epic quality, where they told of the building of the new city and the cavern sea. The old ones had gone about it scientifically, quarrying insoluble rocks from the heart of the honeycombed mountains, and employing expert workers from the nearest submarine city to perform the construction according to the best methods. These workers brought with them all that was necessary to establish the new venture, Shogoth tissue from which to breed stone lifters, and subsequent beasts of burden for the cavern city,

and other protoplasmic matter to mold into phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes. 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 Shogoths 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 right, and to work more from spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times. They were, however, kept in admirable control. The phosphorescent organism 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 a 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 deconant art, or had ceased to recognize the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate, the Eon Silent Ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denundation, though all the best separate statues like other movables had been taken away. The decadent cartouches and dottoes 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-bottomed 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 colds, malign encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer. The sory and livestock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were standing at 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 shogoths 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 and eternal blackness? Had the subterranean waters frozen at last?

To what fate had the ocean-bottomed 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 Migo 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 unplummed abysses of Earth's deepest waters? Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of pressure, and men of the sea had fished up curious objects at times. And as the killer whale theory really explained the savage and mysterious scars on Antarctic seals noticed a generation ago by Bortchgrove ink. 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 30 million years old, and we reflected that in their day the sea cavern city, and indeed the cavern itself 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 lakes 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 mountain 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. End of Chapter 8. Chapter 9 of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This Libravox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker.

Chapter 9 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 above the great abyss, down whose side adequate paths, improved by the old ones, led to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold, this fabulous gulf and 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 on our present flight. It was now 8 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 places for days, and perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography. Curiosity, having long ago got the better of horror. But just now we must hasten. Our supply of trailblazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augmented. But we did let one large notebook go. If worse 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 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 foothills, of a vast five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial nature, which we tried to identify from our aerial 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 southerly 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 demway 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 debris, 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. Many must have told tales of immense historical importance, and our only prospect of later visits reconciled us to the need of passing them by.

As it was, we slowed down once in a while and turned on our second torch. If we had had more films, we would certainly have paused briefly to photograph certain boss-reliefs, but time-consuming hand-copying was clearly out of the question. I come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate, or to hint rather than state, is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the rest in order to justify my course and discouraging further exploration. We had wormed our way very close to the computed sight 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 and decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of late workmanship. When, about 8.30 p.m., Danfort's keen young nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual. If we had had a dog with us, I suppose 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 reacted 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 debris. Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris 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 litter 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 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 appalling in this place under the known circumstances, unless, of course, getney. For the odor was the plain and familiar one of common petrol, everyday gasoline. Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We knew now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled into this knighted burial place of the eons. Hence could not doubt any longer the existence of nameless conditions,

present or at least recent, just ahead. Yet in the end we did let sheer burning curiosity, or anxiety, or auto-hypnotism, or vague thoughts of responsibility toward Gedney, or whatnot, drive us on. Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen at the alley turning in the ruins above, and a faint musical piping,

potentially of tremendous significance in the light of late dissection report despite its close resemblance to the cavemouth echoes of the windy peaks, which he thought he'd shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left, of what had disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivable, a wild trip across the monstrous mountains and a descent into the unknown primal masonry. But we could not convince each other, or even our same. of anything definite.

We had turned off all light as we stood and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet, until very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease. We had been all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that

rift glimpsed from the air. Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not going to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened. The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carven walls of the blocked corridor in which we stood, showed several doorways in various states of obstruction. And from one of them, the gasoline odor, quite submerging that other hint of odor, came with a special distinctness. As we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a slight and recent clearing away of debris from that particular opening. Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly manifest. I do not think anyone will wonder that we waited an appreciable time

before making any further motion. And yet when we did venture inside that black arch, our first impression was one of anti-climax, for amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured crypt, a perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet, there remained no recent object of instantly discernible size, so that we looked instinctively, though in vain, for a farther doorway. In another moment, however, Danforth's sharp vision had described a place where the floor debris had been disturbed, and we turned on both torches full strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually simple and trifling, I am nonetheless reluctant to tell of it because of what it implied. It was a rough leveling of the debris, upon which several small objects lay carelessly scattered,

and at one corner of which a considerable amount of gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odor, even at this extreme super plateau altitude. In other words, it cannot be other than a sort of camp, a camp made by a camp made by questing beings, who like us had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss. Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was concerned, all from Lake's camp, and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place. Many spent matches, three illustrated books, more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with its pictorial and instructional carton. A broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of

fur and tint cloth, a used electric battery with circular of directions, a folder that came with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was all bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on them, we felt we had come to the worst. We had found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp, which might have prepared us, yet the effect of the sight down there in the pre-human vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much to bear. A mad Gedony might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave mounds might have been made, and he might have conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches, varying in their accuracy or lack

of it, which outlined the neighboring parts of the city, and traced the way from a circularly represented place outside our previous route, a place we identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings, and as a vast circular gulf, glimpsed in our aerial survey, to the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel mouth therein. He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches. For those before us were quite obviously compiled as our own had been from late sculptures somewhere in the glacial labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had seen and used, But what this art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute those sketches in a strange and assured technique, perhaps superior, despite haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings from which they were taken, the characteristic and unmistakable technique of the old ones themselves in the dead city's heyday. There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for our lives after that, since our conclusions were now, notwithstanding the day.

their wildness, completely fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention to those who have read my account as far as this. Perhaps we were mad. For have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of the same spirit, albeit in a less extreme form, in the men who stalked deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits. Half paralyzed with terror, though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us.

a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end. Of course we did not mean to face that, or those, which we knew, had been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this time have found the other neighboring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within to whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate gulf. The ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the north, seeking another. They were, we remembered, partly independent of light.

Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our new emotions took, just what change of immediate objective it was that so sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what we feared, yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage point. probably we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though there was interposed a new goal in the form of that great circular place shown on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at once recognized it as a monstrous cylindrical tower, figuring in the very earliest carvings, but appearing only as a prodigious round aperture from above. Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these hasty diagrams, made us think that its subglacial, levels must still form a feature of peculiar importance.

Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible age according to the sculptures in which it figured, being indeed among the first things built in the city. Its carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover, it might form a good present link with the upper world, a shorter route than the one we were so carefully blazing, and probably that by which those others had descended. At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches,

which quite perfectly confirmed our own, and start back over the indicated course to the circular place, the course which our nameless predecessors must have traversed twice before us. The other neighboring gate to the abyss would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our journey, during which we continued to leave an economical trail of paper, for it was precisely the same in kind as that by which we had reached the cul-de-sac, except that it tended to adhere more closely to the ground level,

and even descend to basement corridors. Every now and then we could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter underfoot, and after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline scent, we were again faintly conscious, spasmodically, of that more hideous and more persistent scent. After the way it branched from our former course, we sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls, noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which indeed seemed to have formed a main aesthetic outlet for the old ones. About 9.30 p.m., while traversing a vaulted corridor whose increasingly glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level, and whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight ahead and were,

able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were coming to the vast circular place, and that our distance from the upper air could not be very great. The corridor ended in an arch surprisingly low for these megalithic ruins, but we could see much through it even before we emerged. Beyond there stretched a prodigious round space, fully 200 feet in diameter, strewed with debris and containing many choked archways corresponding to the one we were about to cross. The walls were, in available spaces, boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic proportions, and displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused by the openness of the spot, an artistic splendor far beyond anything we had encountered before. The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated,

and we fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth. But the salient object of the place was the Titanic Stone ramp, which, eluding the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally up the stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart of those once climbed outside the monstrous towers or ziggurots of antique Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight and the perspective which confounded the descent with the tower's inner wall had prevented our noticing this feature from the air, and thus caused us to seek another avenue to the subglacial level. Pabody might have been able to tell what sort of engineering held it in place, but Danforth and I could merely admire in marvel.

We could see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there, but what we saw seemed inadequate to the function performed. The thing was excellently preserved up to the present top of the tower, a highly remarkable circumstance in view of its exposure, and its shelter had done much to protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls. As we stepped out into the awesome half-daylight of this monstrous cylinder bottom, 50 million years old, and without doubt the most primal ancient structure ever to meet our eyes, we saw that the ramp traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully 60 feet.

This, we recalled from our aerial survey, meant an outside glaciation of some 40 feet, since the yawning gulf we had seen from the plain had been at the top of an approximately 20-foot mound of crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths of its circumference by the massive, curving walls of a line of higher ruins. According to the sculptures, the original tower had stood in the center of an immense circular plaza, and had been perhaps 500 or 600 feet high, with tears of horizontal discs near the top, and a rove needle-like spires along the upper rim. Most of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward,

a fortunate happening, since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and the whole interior choked. As it was, the ramp showed sad battering, whilst the choking was such that all the archways at the bottom seemed to have been recently half cleared. It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by which those others had descended, and that this would be the logical route for our own ascent, despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere. The tower's mouth was no farther from the foothills in our waiting plain than was the great terraced building we had entered, and any further subglacial exploration we might make on this trip would lie in this general region. Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips, even after all we had seen and guessed. Then as we picked our way cautiously over the debris of the great floor,

there came a sight which for the time excluded all other matters. It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the ramps lower and outward projecting course, which had hitherto been screened from our view. There they were, the three sledges missing from Lake's camp, shaken by a hard usage, which must have included forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and debris, as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped,

and contained things memorably familiar enough. The gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provisioned tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and some bulging with less obvious contents, everything derived from Lake's equipment. After what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared for this encounter. The really great shock came when we stepped over an undid one tarpaulin whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others, as well as Lake, had been interested in collecting typical specimens, for there were two here, both stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive plaster where some wounds around the neck had occurred, and wrapped with patent care to prevent further damage.

They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog. End of Chapter 9. Chapter 10 of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This Librevox recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 10 Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking about the northward tunnel in the abyss so soon after our somber discovery, and I am not prepared to say that we would have immediately revived such thoughts, but for a specific circumstance which broke in upon us and set up a whole new train of speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney, and were standing in a kind of mute bewilderment, when the sounds finally reached our consciousness. The first sounds we had heard since descending out of the open

where the mountain wind wind whined faintly from its unearthly heights. Well-known and mundane, though they were, their presence in this remote world of death was more unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones could possibly have been, since they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmic harmony. Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range which Lake's dissection report had led us to expect in those others,

and which indeed our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind-howl we had heard since coming on the camp horror, it would have been a kind of hellish congruity with the eon dead region around us. A voice from other epics belongs in a graveyard of other epics. As it was, however, the noise shattered all our profoundly seated adjustments, all our tacit acceptance of the inner Antarctic as a waste, as utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life as the sterile disc of the moon. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of Elder Earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.

Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarized by our sea-days off Victoria land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shut up. to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief, it was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin. The muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses nearly opposite to the corridor whence we had come. Regions manifestly in the direction of that other tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a living waterbird in such a direction, in a world whose surface was one of age-long and uniform lifelessness, could lead to only a woman.

only one conclusion. Hence our first thought was to verify the objective reality of the sound. It was indeed repeated, and seemed at times to come from more than one throat, seeking its source we entered an archway from which much debris had been cleared, resuming our trailblazing, with an added paper supply taken with curious repugnance from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledges when we left daylight behind. As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned some curious dragging tracks, and once Danforth found a distinct print of a sort whose description would be only too superfluous. The course indicated by the penguin cries was precisely what our map and compass prescribed as an approach to the more northerly tunnel mouth,

and we were glad to find that a bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels seemed open. The tunnel, according to the chart, ought to start from the basement of a large pyramidal structure, which we seemed vaguely to recall from our aerial survey as remarkably well preserved. Along our path the single torch showed a customary profusion of carvings, but we did not pause to examine any of these. Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier, fears of what might lurk near.

Those other ones, having left their supplies in the great circular place, must have planned to return after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss. Yet we now had discarded all caution concerning them as completely as if they had never existed. This white waddling thing was full six feet high, yet we seemed to realize at once that it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and according to the sculptures, their might be able to be able to motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter, despite the queerness of their seaborne tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain,

we were indeed clutched for an instant by a primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax, as the white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind, which had summoned it in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin, albeit of a huge unknown species, larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.

When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on the indifferent and unheating group of three, we saw that they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the old one's sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same stock, undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits. That their present habitat was the vast abyss we sought was not for a moment to be

doubted, and this evidence of the Gulf's continued warmth and habitability filled us with the most curious and subtly perturbing fancies. We wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of their usual domain. The state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that it had at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest indifference of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any passing party of those others should have startled them. Was it possible that those others had taken some aggressive action or tried to increase their meat supply. We doubted whether that pungent odor which the dogs had hated could cause an equal

antipathy in these penguins, since their ancestors had obviously lived on excellent terms with the old ones, an amicable relationship which must have survived in the abyss below as long as any of the old ones remained. Regretting, in a flare-up of the old spirit of pure science, that we could not photograph these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them to their squawking and pushed on toward the abyss, whose openness was now so positively proved to us, and whose exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear. Not long afterward, a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly sculpturalist corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel mouth at last.

We had passed two more penguins, and heard others immediately ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp involuntarily. A perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep underground, fully a hundred feet in diameter and 50 feet high, with low archways opening around all parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning cavernously with a black-arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the vault to a height of nearly 15 feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss. In this vast hemisphere whose concave roof was impressively, though decadently carved to a likeness,

of the primordial celestial dome, a few albino penguins waddled, aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The black tunnel yawned indefinitely off at a steep, descending grade, its aperture, adorned with grotesquely chiseled jams and lentil. From that cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air, and perhaps even a suspicion of vapor proceeded. And we wondered what living entities other than penguins,

the limitless void below. and the contiguous honeycomings of the land in the Titan Mountains might conceal. We wondered, too, whether the trace of mountaintop smoke at first suspected by poor lake, as well as the odd haze we had ourselves perceived around the rampart crowned peak, might not be caused by the tortuous channeled rising of some such vapor from the unfathomed regions of Earth's core. Entering the tunnel we saw that its outline was, at least at the start, about 15 feet each way, sides floor and arched roof composed of the usual megalithic masonry the sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of conventional designs in a late decadent style and all the construction and carving were marvellously well preserved the floor was quite clear except for a slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks of those others the farther one advanced the warmer it became so that we were soon unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered whether there were any actual igneous manifestations below, and whether the

waters of that sunless sea were hot. After a short distance, the masonry gave place to solid rock, though the tunnel kept the same proportions and presently the same aspect of carved regularity. Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that grooves were cut in the floor. Several times we'd noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in our diagrams. None of the them, such as to complicate the problem of our return, and all of them welcome as possible refuges, in case we met unwelcome entities on their way back from the abyss. The nameless scent of such things was very distinct. Doubtless, it was suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the known conditions, but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain

persons than most suspect. Indeed, it was just such a lure which had brought us to this unearthly polar waste in the first place. We saw several penguins as we passed along and speculated on the distance we would have to traverse. The carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the abyss. But our previous wanderings had shown us that matters of scale were not wholly to be depended on. After about a quarter of a mile, the nameless scent became greatly accentuated, and we kept

very careful track of the various lateral openings we passed. There was no visible vapor as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air. The temperature was rapidly ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a careless heap of material, shudderingly familiar to us. It was composed of furs and tentcloth taken from Lake's camp, and we did not pause to study the bizarre forms

into which the fabrics had been slashed. Slightly beyond this point, we noticed a decided increase in the size and number of the side galleries and concluded that the densely honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills must now have been reached. The nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another, and scarcely less offensive odor of what nature we could not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterranean fungi. Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the carvings had not prepared us, a broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-looking elliptical

cavern with a level floor, some 75 feet long and 50 broad, and with many immense side passages leading away into cryptical darkness. Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torches suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several walls between adjacent honeycomings. The walls were rough, and the high-vaulted roof was thick with stalactites, but the solid rock floor had been smoothed off and was free from all debris detritings. or even dust, to a positively abnormal extent. Except for the avenue through which we had come, this was true of the floors of all the great galleries opening off from it,

and the singularity of the condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling. The curious new fetter which had supplemented the nameless scent was excessively pungent here, so much so that it destroyed all trace of the other. Something about this whole place with its polished and almost glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any of the monstrous things we had previously encountered. The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the larger proportion of penguin droppings there, prevented all confusion as to the right course amidst this plethora of equally great cave mouths.

Nevertheless, we resolved to resume our paper trailblazing, if any further complexity should develop. For dust tracks, of course, could no longer be expected. Upon resuming our direct progress, we cast a beam of torchlight over the tunnel walls, and stopped short in amazement at the supremely radical change which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage. We realized, of course, the great decadence of the old one's sculpture at the time of the tunneling, and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference, wholly transcending explanation, a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound

and calamitous a degration of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it. This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail. It was countersunk, with exaggerated depth and bands following the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections. But the height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface. Danforth had the idea that it was a second carving, a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In nature it was wholly decorative and conventional, and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of the old ones, yet seeming more like a parody than a perpetuation of

that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique. An alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike what we had come to recognize as the old one's art, and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly palmerine sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner. That others had recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presence of a used torch battery on the floor in front of one of the most characteristic designs. Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we resumed our advance

after a cursory look, though frequently casting beams over the walls to see if any further decorative changes developed. Nothing of the sort was perceived, though the carvings were in places rather sparse because of the numerous mouths of smooth-floored lateral tunnels. We saw and heard fewer penguins, but thought we caught a vague suspicion of an infinitely distant chorus of them somewhere deep within the earth. The new and inexplicable odor was abominably strong, and we could detect scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapor ahead bespoke increasing contrasts and temperature, and the relative nearness of the sunless sea cliffs of the great abyss. then quite unexpectedly we saw certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead. Obstructions which were quite definitely not penguins,

and turned on our second torch after making sure that the objects were quite stationary. End of Chapter 10. Chapter 11 of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. The Slibervox recording is in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage, but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and leaving only such an added sensitiveness that memory re-inspires

all the original horror. We saw, as I've said, certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead, and I may add that our nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously, by a very curious intensification of the strange prevailing fetter, now quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench of those others which had gone before us. The light of the second torch left no doubt of what the obstructions were, and we dared approach them only because we could see, even from a distance, that they were quite as past all harming power, as had been the six smaller specimens unearthed from the monstrous star-mounted graves at poor lakes' camp.

They were indeed, as lacking in completeness as most of those we had unearthed, though it grew plain from the thick dark green pool gathering around them, that their incompleteness was of infinite greater recency. There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake's bulletins would have suggested no less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us. To find them in this state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort of monstrous struggle had occurred down here in the dark. Penguins attacked in a body retaliate savagely with their beaks,

and our ears now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those others disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? The obstructions did not suggest it, for penguin beaks against the tough tissues Lake had dissected, could hardly account for the terrible damage our approaching glance was beginning to make out. Besides, the huge blind birds we had seen appeared to be singularly peaceful, Had there then been a struggle among those others, and were the absent four responsible? If so, where were they?

Were they close at hand and likely to form an immediate menace to us? We glanced anxiously at some of the smooth-floored lateral passages as we continued our slow and frankly reluctant approach. Whatever the conflict was, it had clearly been that which had frightened the penguins into their unaccustomed wandering. It must then have arisen near that faintly heard, rookery in the incalculable Gulf beyond, since there were no signs that any birds had normally dwelt here. Perhaps, we reflected, there had been a hideous running fight, with the weaker party seeking to get back to the cached sledges when their pursuers finished them.

One could picture the demoniac fray between namelessly monstrous entities as it surged out of the black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins squawking and scurrying ahead. I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly and reluctantly. What to heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded.

Run back before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again. Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects so that we soon realized the dominant factor in their incompleteness. Malled, compressed, twisted, and ruptured as they were, their chief common injury was total decapitation. From each one the tentacled starfish head had been removed,

and as we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like some hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage. Their noisome dark green ickers, formed a large spreading pool, but its stench was half-overshadowed by that newer and stranger stench, here more pungent than at any other point along our route. Only when we had come very close to the sprawling obstructions, could we trace that second, unexplainable fetter to any immediate source.

In the instant we did so, Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures of the old one's history in the Permian Age a hundred and fifty million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry, which echoed hysterically through that vaulted, an archaic passage with the evil palimpsest carvings. I came only just short of echoing his cry myself, for I had seen those primal structures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had suggested that hideous slime coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate old ones. those whom the frightful Shogoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness

in the Great War of Re-subjugation. They were infamous nightmare sculptures, even when telling of age-old bygone things, for Shogoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings, or portrayed by any beings. The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that none had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had ever conceived them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes. Viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells. Rubbery 15-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile.

Slaves of suggestion, builders of cities. More and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative. Great God. What madness made even those blasphemous old ones willing to use and to carve such things? And now when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies

and stank obscenely with that new unknown odor whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly re-sculptured wall in a series of grouped dots We understood the quality of cosmic fear To its uttermost depths It was not fear of those four missing others

For all too well did we suspect They would do no harm again Poor devils After all they were not evil things of their kind They were the men of another age And another order of being Nature had played a hellish jest on them As it will on any others

That human madness, callousness, or cruelty May hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste, and this was their tragic homecoming. They had not been even savages, for what indeed had they done, that awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch, perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them, and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia.

Poor Lake, poor Gedney, and poor old ones. scientists to the last. What had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a face of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible. Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn, whatever they had been, they were men. They had crossed the icy peaks on whose temple slopes they had once worshipped and roamed among the tree-furns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days, as we had done.

They tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seen. And what had they found? All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me, as we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes, to the loathsome palimcest sculptures and the diabolical dot groups, of fresh slime on the wall beside them, looked and understood what must have triumphed and survived down here in the Cyclopean water city

of that knighted penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly, as if in answer to Danforth's hysterical scream. The shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had froze us into mute motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that we have learned of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment. It seemed eons that we stood there, but actually it could not have been more than ten or fifteen seconds.

That hateful, pallid mist curled forward as if veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulk, and then came a sound which upset much of what we had just decided, and in so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run like mad past squirt, squawking confused penguins over our former trail back to the city, along ice-sunken, megalithic corridors, to the great open circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied automatic plunge for the sane outer air and light of day. The new sound, as I've intimated, upset much that we had decided, because it was what poor lake's dissection had led us to attribute to those we had just judged dead.

It was, Danforth later told me. me, precisely what he had caught in infinitely muffled form, when at that spot beyond the alley corner above the glacial level. And it certainly had a shocking resemblance to the wind pipings we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves. At the risk of seeming pure aisle, I will add another thing, too, if only because of the surprising way Danforth's impression chimed with mine. Of course, common reading is what prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing his Arthur Gordon Pim a century ago.

It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the Antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic, spectrally snowy birds of that malign region's core. Tekalili, tecali. That, I may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard, conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing white mist, that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range. We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered,

though we knew that the swiftness of the old ones would enable any scream-roused and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really wished to do so. We had a vague hope, however, that non-aggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason might cause such a being to spare us in case of capture, if only from scientific curiosity. After all, if such a one had nothing to fear for itself, it would have no motive in harming us. Concealment being futile at this juncture, we used our torch for a running glance behind and perceived that the mist was thinning. Would we see, at last, a complete, and living specimen of those others.

Again came that insidious musical piping. Teckle-le-lee, Teckle-lee, then, noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer. It occurred to us that the entity might be wounded. We could take no chances, however, since it was very obviously approaching an answer to Danforth's scream, rather than in flight from any other entity. The timing was too close to admit of doubt,

of the whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable nightmare, that fetid, unglimped mountain of slime spewing protoplasm, whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to recarve and squirm through the burrows of the hills. We could form no guess, and it cost us a genuine pain to leave this probably crippled old one, perhaps a lone survivor, to the peril of recapture in a nameless fate. Thank heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened again. The furling mist had thickened again, and was driving ahead with increased speed, whilst the straying penguins in our rear were squawking and screaming and displaying signs of a panic really surprising, in view of their relatively

minor confusion when we had passed them. Once more came that sinister, wide-ranged piping. Teck a-le-le-le-le-le-le! We had been wrong. The thing was not wounded, but had merely paused on encountering the bodies of its fallen kindred, and the hellish slime inscription above them. We could never know what that demon message was, but those burials at Lake's camp had shown how much importance the being attached to their dead. A recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us, the large open cavern where various ways converged. And we were glad to be leaving those morbid palimpsest sculptures,

almost felt even when scarcely seen, behind. Another thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of losing our pursuer at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were several of the blind albino penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear that their fear of the oncoming entity was extreme to the point of unaccountability. If at this point we dimmed our torch to the very lowest limit of traveling need, keeping it strictly in front of us, the frightened squawking motions of the huge birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls,

screen our true course, and somehow set up a false lead. amidst the churning, spiraling fog, the littered and unglissening floor of the main tunnel beyond this point, as differing from the other morbidly polished burrows, could hardly form a highly distinguished feature, even so far as we could conjecture for those indicated special senses, which made the old ones partly, though imperfectly, independent of light at emergencies. In fact, we were somewhat apprehensive, lest we go astray ourselves in our haste, for we have to have. Mad, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city, since the consequences of loss in those unknown foothill honeycomings would be unthinkable. The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did take a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The penguins alone could not have saved us,

but in conjunction with the mist they seemed to have done so. Only a benign fate kept the curling vapors thick enough at the right moment. moment, for they were constantly shifting and threatening to vanish. Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we emerged from the nauseously re-sculptured tunnel into the cave, so that we actually caught one first and only half-glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final, desperately fearful glance backward, before dimming the torch and mixing with the penguins in the hope of dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us was benign, that which gave us the half-g glimpse was infinitely the opposite. For to that flash of semi-vision can be traced a full half of the horror

which has ever since haunted us. Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the immemorial instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its pursuer, or perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a subconscious question raised by one of our senses. In the midst of our flight, with all our faculties centered on the problem of escape, we were in no condition. to observe and analyze details. Yet even so our latent brain cells must have wondered at the message brought them by our nostrils. Afterward, we realized what it was. There our retreat, from the fetid slime coating on those headless obstructions,

and the coincident approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of stenches which logic called for. In the neighborhood of the prostrate things that new and lately unexplainable fetter had been wholly dominant, but by this time it ought to have largely given place to the nameless stench associated with those others. This it had not done, for instead the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent each second. So we glanced back, simultaneously it would appear, though no doubt the incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so, we flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily

thinned mist, either from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth center ahead. Unhappy act. Not Orpheus himself or Lott's wife paid much more dearly for a backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping. Teckle-le-le-le-le. I might as well be frank. even if I cannot bear to be quite direct, in stating what we saw, though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other. The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself.

It crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through, perhaps better than reason could have done, though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason, we certainly had little enough left. Danforth was totally unstrung,

and the first thing I remember of the rest of the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant, an hysterical formula in which I alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins, reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and, thank God, through the now empty, vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at once, else we would not have been alive and blindly racing.

I shudder to think of what a shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought. South Station, under Washington, under, Park, Street, under, Kendall, Central, Harvard. The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England. yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nephandus, anology that had suggested it. We had expected upon looking back to see a terrible and incredibly moving entity if the mists were thin enough. But of that entity we had formed a clear idea.

What we did see, for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned, was something altogether different. and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter objective embodiment of the fantastic novelists, thing that should not be. And its nearest comprehensible analog is a vast, on-rushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform. The great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely colored lights

and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder. But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its 15-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing, vaster than any subway train, a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes, forming and unforming, as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us,

crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that Eldritch, mocking cry, Tekalili, Teckalili. And at last we remembered that the Demos, Shogoth, given life, thought, and plastic organs, patterned solely by the old ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups expressed, had likewise no voice, save the imitated accents of their bygone masters. End of Chapter 11. Chapter 12 of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. This Libervox recording is in the public domain.

Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 12 Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopian rooms and corridors of the dead city. Yet these are purely dream fragments, involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was as if we floated in a nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or orientation. The gray half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat, but we did not go near those cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog.

They have a strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end of this planet will find them still undisturbed. It was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we first felt the terrible fatigue and short breath, which our race through the thin plateau air had produced. But not even the fear of collapse could make us pause before reaching the normal outer rim of sun and sky. There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from those buried epochs, for as we wound our panting way at the 60-foot cylinder of primal masonry, we glimpsed beside us a continuous procession of heroic sculptures in the dead races early and undecayed technique, a farewell from the old ones, written 50 million years ago.

Finally scrambling out at the top we found ourselves on a great mound of tumble blocks, with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward, and the brooding peaks of the great mountains, showing beyond the more crumbled structures toward the east. The low Antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon, through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast, with such relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape. The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice vapors, and the cold clutched at our vitals. Warily resting the outfit bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout

our desperate flight, we rebuttoned our heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the mound, and the walk through the eon old stone maze to the foothills where our aeroplane waited. Of what had set us fleeing from the darkness of Earth's secret and archaic gulfs, we said nothing at all. In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the foothills, the probable ancient terrace, by which we had descended, and could see the dark bulk of our great plain amidst the sparse ruins on the rising slope ahead. Halfway uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic Paleogean tangle of incredible stone shapes below us, once more outlined mystically against an unknown west.

As we did so, we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning haziness, the restless ice vapors, having moved up to the zenith, where their mocking outlines seemed on the point of settling into some bizarre pattern, which they feared to make quite definite or conclusive. There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque city, a dim, elfin line of pinncled violet, whose needle-pointed heights loomed dreamlike against the beckoning rose-color of the western sky. Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancient table,

land, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land, highest of earth's peaks and focus of earth's evil, harborers of nameless horrors and archaicons and archaic secrets, shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning, untrodden by any living thing of earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the plains in the polar night.

Beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded Gaddaith in the cold waste beyond abhorrent eling, whereof unholy primal legends hint evasively. We were the first human beings ever to see them, and I hope to God we may be the last. If the sculptured maps and pictures in that pre-human city had told truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than 300 miles away. Yet nonetheless, sharply did their dim elfin essence just above that remote and snowy rim,

like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. Their height then must have been tremendous beyond all-known comparison, carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata, peopleed by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls. Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their cursed slopes, and wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain in the fears of those old ones who carved them so reticently. I recalled how their northerly end must come near the coast at Queen Maryland, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away

and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed a measure of my overwrought condition at the time, and Danforth seemed to be even worse. Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane, our fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast enough range whose, recrossing lay ahead of us. From these foothills the black ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously against the east, again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Rorick. And when we thought of the damnable honeycombs inside them, and of the frightful, amorphous entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles,

we could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave-mouth. where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range. To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the summits, as poor Lake must have done when he made that early mistake about volcanism, and thought shiveringly of that kindred mist from which we had just escaped, of that and of the blasphemous horror-fustering abyss whence all such vapors came. All was well with the plane and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying furs. Danforth got the engines started without trouble, and we made a very smooth take-off over the

nightmare city. Below us, the primal cyclopean masonry spread out as it had done when first we saw it, so short, yet infinitely long a time ago. And we began rising and turning to test the wind for our crossing through the pass. At a very high level, there must have been great disturbance since the ice dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things, but at 24,000 feet the height we needed for the pass, we found navigation quite practicable. As we drew close to the jutting peaks, the wind's strange piping again became manifest, and I could see Danforth's hands trembling at the controls. Rank amateur, though I was, I thought at that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in affecting the dangerous crossing between pinnacles. And when I made motions to change seats

and take over his duties he did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the pass, resolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountaintop vapor, and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses men off the sirens coast to keep that disturbing wind piping from my consciousness. But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could not keep quiet.

I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-reddled, cube-barncled peaks, sideways at the bleak sea of snowy rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the seething grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass, that its mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself, and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for our own.

moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed, and we made the crossing safely. Yet I'm afraid that Danforth will never be the same again. I've said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely, a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the winds piping, and the engines buzzing, as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly. down toward the camp. But that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we'd made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things we'd agreed were not for people to know and discuss lightly, and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweathermore expedition

and others at any cost. It is absolutely necessary for the peace and safety of mankind that some of earth's dark dead corners and unplumped depths be let alone, lest sleeping abnormality. wake to resurgent life and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black layers to newer and wider conquests. All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of echoing vaporous, warmly honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed, but a single, fantastic, demoniac glimpse among the churning zenith clouds,

of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains, which the old ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion, born of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual, though unrecognized mirage of the dead, transmontane city experienced near Lake's camp the day before. But it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still. He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about

the black pit, the carven rim, the proto-sogoths, the windowless solids with five dimensions, the nameless cylinder, the elder pharos, yogsothoth, the primal white jelly, the color out of space, the wings, the eyes and darkness, the moon ladder, the original, the eternal, the undying, and other bizarre conceptions. But when he is fully himself, he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-reddled copy of the necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library. The higher sky as we crossed the range was surely vaporous and disturbed enough,

and although I did not see the zenith, I can well imagine that its swirls of ice dust may have taken strange forms. imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud might easily have supplied the rest. And of course, Danforth did not hint any of those specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance. At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad word. of all too obvious source. Teckle-Lee, Lee, Teckle-Lee.

End of Chapter 12. End of At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft.