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, proportions, decorations, 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 bare 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 æsthetically
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 the 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 analogue 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 and 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 countersunk 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 æons 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 varied by the presence of
maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs on an enlarged
scale--these things giving a naïve and terrible corroboration to what
we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dados.

In 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 any were to be
allured to that realm of death and horror by the very warning meant to
discourage them.

Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive
twelve-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, lighting, and the like--of a sort suggested in
many of the carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had 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 tomblike, echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the
floors were generally thick with detritus, litter, and débris, but
farther down this condition decreased.

In 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 we had seen in other structures, 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
sculptured 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 æon-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 effected 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 naïve 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
Dinosauria roamed the tropical steppes 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 archæan 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 scarabæus, 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 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 Dinosauria were not indeed Dinosauria, but far worse. Mere
Dinosauria were new and almost brainless objects--but the builders of
the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in 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
Pnakotic 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 an 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 and 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. 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 forty or
possibly even fifty million years--to the lower Eocene or upper
Cretaceous--and contained bas-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 preterrestrial life of the star-headed
beings on other planets, in other galaxies, and in other universes--can
readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings
themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so
uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and 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 two hundred
feet square and sixty 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 phases 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 up 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 discouraged.

                                 VII.

The full story, so far as deciphered, will eventually appear in an
official bulletin of Miskatonic 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 to-day, 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 enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets, having
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 doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered
about as the "Shoggoths" in his frightful _Necronomicon_, though even
that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the
dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.

When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized their
simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, 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 Shoggoths, 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 Palæogæan
cities, including that whose æon-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 bas-reliefs,
and showed vast clusters of needlelike spires, delicate finials
on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin, horizontal
scalloped disks capping cylindrical shafts.

This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous
mirage, cast by a dead city whence such sky-line features had been
absent for thousands and ten 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 in 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
bas-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 pseudofeet. 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 pseudofeet, 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 in muscular-nervous
coördination--ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic
and other manual operations.

The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific
pressure 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 facts that they covered their vertically
inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in
Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and recuperation necessary
after the sculptures revealed it.

[Illustration: _The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even
terrific pressures were powerless to harm them!_]

The beings multiplied by means of spores--like vegetable pteridophyta,
as Lake had 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 prothallia 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 æsthetic
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 residence,
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 viands 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 become 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 nonpairing and semivegetable in 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 the pictured occupations and
diversions of codwellers--congenial mental association.

In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the center of the
huge rooms, leaving all wall spaces free for decorative treatment.
Lighting, in the case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a
device probably electro-chemical in nature.

Both on land and under water 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 local and between different
cities--certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed,
serving as money. Probably the smaller of the various greenish
soapstones found by our 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--Shoggoths 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 aërial--were the products of
unguided evolution acting on life cells made 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 vaguely
simian 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
palæontology.

The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic
changes and convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of
miraculous. Though few or none of their first cities seem to have
remained beyond the Archæan 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 under water, with
stone cities scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as æons
passed.

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 display this land mass as cracking and drifting, and
sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the
theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and
Joly.

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 prehuman
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 and 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
Ones' civilization, and all the 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 R'lyeh 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 in my coming monograph that some
archæologist make systematic borings with Pabodie'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 Shoggoths 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 Shoggoths 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
semistable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition
echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it.

Sculptured images of these Shoggoths 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 fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had,
however, a constantly shifting shape and 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 one hundred and fifty 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 Shoggoths 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 Shoggoths 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 Shoggoths 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-fungous,
half-crustacean creatures--creatures undoubtedly the same as those
figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered
in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men.

To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, for the first time
since their terrene 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 Mi-Go 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 Mi-Go seem 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 seem 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 space-time continuum--whereas the first
sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath.
All this, of course, assuming that the nonterrestrial linkages and
the anomalies ascribed to 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 ethics 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 Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all
the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which
cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically
viscous lower surface--an hypothesis suggested by such things as the
complimentary outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the
great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up--receives striking
support from this uncanny source.

Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous of a hundred million or
more years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later
to separate Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe (then
the Valusia of primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic
continent.

Other charts--and most significantly one in connection with the
founding fifty 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 Pliocene
Age--the approximate world of to-day 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
Graham Land.

In the Carboniferous map the whole globe--ocean floor and rifted land
mass 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 Pliocene specimen showed no land cities except on the
antarctic continent and the tip of South America, nor any ocean
cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge
and interest in the northern world, save for a study of coast lines
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 up-thrust 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 aërial survey--there were reputed to be preserved certain sacred
stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city, which were thrust up
to light after long epochs in the course of the general crumpling of
strata.

                                 VIII.

Naturally, Danforth and I studied with 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.

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 a
neighboring rift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying
the story of the region, much beyond the Pliocene map, whence we
derived our last general glimpse of the prehuman world. This was the
last place we examined in detail, since what we found there set upon 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. The conviction grew upon us that this
hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng
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 Luitpold Land on the coast of Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the
entire continent. The really high part stretched in a mighty arc from
about Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70°, East Longitude
115°, 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 Mawson 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's
highest. That grim honor is beyond doubt reserved for something
which half the sculptures hesitated to record at all, whilst others
approached it with 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 din 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 forty thousand feet high--radically vaster than
even the shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended,
it appeared, from about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°,
E. Longitude 100°--less than three hundred 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
coast line at Queen Mary Land.

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 Wilhelm Lands--and I thank Heaven no one has been able to land
and climb those hills. I am not as sceptical about old tales and fears
as I used to be, and I do not laugh now at the prehuman sculptor's
notion that lightning 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 may be a
very real and very monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about
Kadath 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 ground waters,
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 nighted 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 Budd and Totten
Lands on Wilkes's coast line. 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 ground waters 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 sense, 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 aëroplane 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, æon-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 in further explorations.

We could soon reconstruct in 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 sinister oppression with which
the city's inhuman 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
somber 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 cycad 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 but have been 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 in
thrall, 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 five hundred thousand 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--five hundred thousand 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 represented 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 constantly growing
migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmth--some fleeing to
cities under the sea off the far-away coast, and some clambering down
through networks of limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the
neighboring black abyss of subterrane 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 special 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 mines.

The linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by means
of several gradings 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 of a mile toward
the ancient rivercourse, 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 under water--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 insure its habitability for an indefinite period.

The beings seem to have had no trouble in adapting themselves to
part-time--and eventually, of course, whole-time--residence under
water, 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 a race 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 in 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--Shoggoth 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 Shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular
intelligence, and were represented as taking and executing orders with
marvelous quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by
mimicking their voices--a sort of musical piping over a wide range,
if poor Lake's dissection had indicated aright--and to work more from
spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times.

They were, however, kept in admirable control. The phosphorescent
organisms supplied light with vast effectiveness, and doubtless atoned
for the loss of the familiar polar auroras of the outer-world night.

Art and decoration were pursued, though, of course, with a certain
decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realize this falling off themselves,
and in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by
transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their
land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped
Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital
greater splendors than its own people could create. That the transfer
of sculptured blocks had not been more extensive, was doubtless owing
to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned.

By the time total abandonment did occur--and it surely must have
occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced--the Old Ones
had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art--or had ceased
to recognize the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate,
the æon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale
sculptural denudation, though all the best separate statues, like other
movables, had been taken away.

The decadent cartouches and dados telling this story were, as I have
said, the latest we could find in our limited search. They left us with
a picture of the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land
city in summer and the sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading
with the sea-bottom cities off the antarctic coast.

By this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have been
recognized, for the sculptures showed many signs of the cold's malign
encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the
winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer.

The saurian live stock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were
standing it none too well. To keep on with the work of the upper
world it had become necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and
curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land life--a thing the Old Ones
had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless,
and the upper sea had lost most of its denizens except the seals and
whales. All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque
penguins.

What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new
sea-cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in
eternal blackness? Had the subterranean waters frozen at last? To what
fate had the ocean-bottom cities of the outer world been delivered?
Had any of the Old Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice cap?
Existing geology shows no trace of their presence. Had the frightful
Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land world of the north? Could
one be sure of what might or might not linger, even to this day, in the
lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth's deepest water?

Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of
pressure--and men of the sea have fished up curious objects at
times. And has the killer-whale theory really explained the savage
and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a generation ago by
Borchgrevingk?

The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for
their geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been
a very early date in the land city's history. They were, according to
their location, certainly not less than thirty million years old, and
we reflected that in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the
cavern itself, had had no existence.

They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary
vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around
them, and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty
mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean.

And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens--especially
about the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake's hideously
ravaged camp. There was something abnormal about that whole
business--the strange things we had tried so hard to lay to somebody's
madness--those frightful graves--the amount _and nature_ of the
missing material--Gedney--the unearthly toughness of those archaic
monstrosities, and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now showed
the race to have----Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last
few hours, and were prepared to believe and keep silent about many
appalling and incredible secrets of primal nature.

                                  IX.

I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a
change in our immediate objective. This, of course, had to do with the
chiseled avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had
not known before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse.

From the evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply
descending walk of about a mile through either of the neighboring
tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs about
the great abyss, down whose side paths, improved by the Old Ones, led
to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this
fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of
resistance once we knew of the thing--yet we realized we must begin the
quest at once if we expected to include it in our present trip.

In was now eight p.m., and we had not enough battery replacements to
let our torches burn on forever. We had done so much of our studying
and copying below the glacial level that our battery supply had had at
least five hours of nearly continuous use, and despite the special dry
cell formula would obviously be good for only about four more--though
by keeping one torch unused, except for especially interesting or
difficult places, we might manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that.

It would not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean catacombs,
hence in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further
mural deciphering. Of course, we intended to revisit the place for days
and perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography--curiosity having
long ago gotten the better of horror--but just now we must hasten.

Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were
reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment
it, but we did let one large notebook go. If worst came to worst, we
could resort to rock chipping--and, of course, it would be possible,
even in case of really lost direction, to work up to full daylight by
one channel or another if granted sufficient time for plentiful trial
and error. So, at last, we set off eagerly in the indicated direction
of the nearest tunnel.

According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired
tunnel mouth could not be much more than a quarter of a mile from where
we stood; the intervening space showing solid-looking buildings quite
likely to be penetrable still at a subglacial level. The opening itself
would be in the basement--on the angle nearest the foothills--of a
vast five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial
nature, which we tried to identify from our aërial survey of the ruins.

No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we
concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had
been totally shattered in an ice rift we had noticed. In the latter
case the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would
have to try the next nearest one--the one less than a mile to the north.

The intervening river course prevented our trying any of the more
southern tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighboring
ones were choked it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant
an attempt on the next northerly one--about a mile beyond our second
choice.

As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map
and compass--traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or
preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges
and clambering down again, encountering choked doorways and piles of
débris, hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily
immaculate stretches, taking false leads and retracing our way (in such
cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while
striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight poured or
trickled down--we were repeatedly tantalized by the sculptured walls
along our route.

We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel's
mouth--having crossed a second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the
tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor especially
rich in decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of
late workmanship--when, about eight thirty p.m., Danforth's keen young
nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual.

If we had had a dog with us, I suppost we would have been warned
before. At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the
formerly crystal-pure air, but after a few seconds our memories reached
only too definitely. Let me try to state the thing without flinching.
There was an odor--and that odor was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably
akin to what had nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the
horror poor Lake had dissected.

Of course, the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it
sounds now. There were several conceivable explanations, and we did a
good deal of indecisive whispering. Most important of all, we did not
retreat without further investigation; for having come this far, we
were loath to be balked by anything short of certain disaster.

Anyway, what we must have suspected was altogether too wild to believe.
Such things did not happen in any normal world. It was probably sheer
irrational instinct which made us dim our single torch--tempted no
longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly
from the oppressive walls--and which softened our progress to a
cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the increasingly littered floor
and heaps of débris.

Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was
likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the débris after we
had passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors
on the ground level. It did not look quite as it ought after countless
thousands of years of desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more
light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked
through it. The irregular nature of the latter precluded any definite
marks, but in the smoother places there were suggestions of the
dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there was a hint of parallel
tracks, as if of runners. This was what made us pause again.

It was during that pause that we caught--simultaneously this time--the
other odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a
more frightful odor--less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely
appalling in this place under the known circumstances--unless, of
course, Gedney----For the odor was the plain and familiar one of common
petrol--every-day 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 nighted burial place of the æons, 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 autohypnotism--or vague thoughts of
responsibility toward Gedney--of what not--drive us on.

Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen at
the alley turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical
piping--potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake's
dissection report, despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth
echoes of the windy peaks--which he thought he had 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 ourselves, of anything
definite. We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely
noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper daylight kept the
blackness from being absolute.

Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by
occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed débris 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 even going
to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture
opened.

The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carved 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 especial distinctness. As
we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a
slight and recent clearing away of débris 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 any one 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 anticlimax. 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 discovered a
place where the floor débris had been disturbed. We turned on both
torches full strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually
simple and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because
of what it implied.

It was a rough leveling of the débris, 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 superplateau altitude. In other words,
it could not be other than a sort of camp--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 tent 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 prehuman
vaults of a nightmare city, was almost too much to bear.

A mad Gedney 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
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 aërial
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 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 stalk
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 in the 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 débris 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 had 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 seem to have formed a main æsthetic outlet for the Old Ones.

About nine-thirty 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 two hundred feet in
diameter--strewn with débris 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 climbing outside the monstrous towers or zikkurats 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.

Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of engineering held it
in place, but Danforth and I could merely admire and 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--fifty million years old, and without doubt the most
primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes--we saw that the
ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty
feet.

This, we recalled from our aërial survey, meant an outside glaciation
of some forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had seen from the plane
had been at the top of an approximately twenty-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 five hundred or six hundred
feet high, with tiers of horizontal disks near the top, and a row of
needlelike 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 seemed to
have been 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 and our
waiting plane 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 débris 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 ramp's 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 débris,
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, provision 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 and 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 care to prevent
further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing
dog.

                                  X.

Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking
about the northward tunnel and 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 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 had a kind of hellish congruity with the æon-dead region
around us. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other
epochs.

As it was, however, the noise shattered all our profoundly seated
adjustments--all out tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste
utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life.

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 shuddered 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 water
bird in such a direction--in a world whose surface was one of age-long
and uniform lifelessness--could lead to 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 débris had
been cleared; resuming our trail blazing--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
aërial 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 had now discarded all caution concerning them as completely as
if they had never existed.

This white, waddling thing was fully 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 motion over land
surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of their
sea-born 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 unheeding 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 Ones' 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 a 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 notion 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 sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were
approaching the tunnel mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins.

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 fifty 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 fifteen 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 jambs and lintel.

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 honeycombings of the land and 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 fifteen 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 later, 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
actually 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 presented the same aspect of
carved regularity. Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that
grooves were cut in the floor.

Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not
recorded in our diagrams; none of 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 that 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 tent cloths 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 subterrane 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 seventy-five
feet long and fifty 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 honeycombings. 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 débris,
detritus, 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 fetor 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 have previously encountered.

The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, prevented all
confusion as to the right course amidst this plethora of equally great
cave mouths. Nevertheless we resolved to resume our paper trail blazing
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 Ones' 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 degradation 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 in 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.

Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we
resumed our advance after a cursory look.

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 in
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.

                                  XI.

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 leave only such added sensitiveness that memory re-inspired all the
original horror.

We saw, as I have 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 fetor, 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 similar specimens unearthed from the monstrous star-mounded
graves at poor Lake's 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 infinitely
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 demonic 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. Would 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. Mauled,
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 ichor 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 fetor to any immediate source--and the
instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures
of the Old Ones' history in the Permian Age one hundred and fifty
million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which echoed
hysterically through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil,
palimpsest carvings.

I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those
primal sculptures, 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
Shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly
headlessness in the great war of resubjugation.

They were infamous, nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old,
bygone things; for Shoggoths 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 fifteen-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 Heaven! 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
resculptured 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? Lord, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing 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 templed slopes they had once
worshiped and roamed among the tree ferns. They had found their dead
city brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as
we had done. They had 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
palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot groups of fresh slime on
the wall beside them--looked and understood what must have triumphed
and survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that nighted,
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
frozen 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 æons 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 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.

[Illustration: _And then came a sound--a horrible sound--which enabled
us to run like mad for the sane outer air_----]

The new sound, as I have 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,
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 puerile 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 Pym" 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. "_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_" 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 nonaggressive 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--"_Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!_"

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 in 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, unglimpsed 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 pang to leave this probably crippled Old
One--perhaps a lone survivor--to the peril of recapture and a nameless
fate.

Thank Heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling 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--"_Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!_" 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 beings attached to their dead.

Our 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 that 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 unglistening floor
of the main tunnel beyond this point, as differing from the other
morbidly polished burrows, could hardly form a highly distinguishing
feature; even, so far as we could conjecture, for those indicated
special senses which made the Old Ones partly, though imperfectly,
independent of light in emergencies.

In fact, we were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves
in our haste. For we had, of course, decided to keep straight on
toward the dead city; since the consequences of loss in those unknown
foothill honeycombings 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 seem to have done so. Only a benign fate
kept the curling vapors thick enough at the right moment, for they were
constantly shifting and threatening to vanish.

Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we emerged from the
nauseously resculptured 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
glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for to that flash of semivision
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--that 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 fetor 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 Lot's wife, paid much more dearly
for a backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged
piping--"_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_"

Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the
rest of the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant a 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 vaulting ahead,
and--thank Heaven--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, nefandous analogy that
had suggested it.

We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible
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 novelist's 'thing that should not be'; and its nearest
comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing 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.

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 fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and
driving before it a spiral, rethickening 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--"_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_" And at
last we remembered that the demonic Shoggoths--given life, though, and
plastic organ patterns 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.

                                 XII.

Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured
hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms
and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream fragments
involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion.

There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from those
buried epochs; for as we wound our panting way up the sixty-foot
cylinder of primal masonry we glimpsed beside us a continuous
procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race's early and undecayed
technique--a farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million years
ago.

Finally, scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound
of tumbled 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 sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice vapors,
and the cold clutched at our vitals.

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 plane 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 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 pinnacled 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 Archæan 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.

If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told
truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than three
hundred miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin
essence jut above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of
a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens.

Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of
what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their
accursed sloping--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
Mary Land, 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 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 re-crossing 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 Roerich; and when we thought of the
damnable honeycombings inside them, and of the frightful amorphous
entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming sway even to
the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the
prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave mouths 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-fostering abyss whence all such vapors came.

All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying
furs. Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a
very smooth take-off over the nightmare city.

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 twenty-four thousand 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 effecting 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.

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-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise 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 his 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 a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and
we made the crossing safely----Yet I am afraid that Danforth will never
be the same again.

I have 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 wind's piping and the engine's 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 had made
as we prepared to leave the nightmare city.

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 those echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains
of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, demonic glimpse,
among the churning westward zenith clouds, of what lay back of those
other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and
feared.

He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things
about "the black pit," "the carven rim," "the proto-Shoggoths," "the
windowless solids with five dimensions," "the nameless cylinders," "the
elder pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color out
of space," "the wings," "the eyes in 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-riddled 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 these 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: "_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_"

                                THE END