III
None of
us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning. Both
the excitement of Lake's discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were
against such a thing. So savage was the blast, even where we were,
that we could not help wondering how much worse it was at Lake's camp,
directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it.
McTighe was awake at ten o'clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless,
as agreed, but some electrical conditions in the disturbed air to the westward
seemed to prevent communications. We did, however, get the Arkham,
and Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly trying to reach Lake.
He had not known about the wind, for very little was blowing at McMurdo
Sound, despite its persistent rage where
we were.
Throughout
the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at intervals, but
invariably without results. About noon a positive frenzy of wind
stampeded out of the west, causing us to fear for the safety of our camp;
but it eventually died down, with only a moderate relapse at 2 P.M.
After three o'clock it was very quiet, and we redoubled our efforts to
get Lake. Reflecting that he had four planes, each provided with
an excellent short-wave outfit, we could not imagine any ordinary accident
capable of crippling all his wireless equipment at once. Nevertheless
the stony silence continued, and when we thought of the delirious force
the wind must have had in his locality we could not help making the most
direful conjectures.
By six
o'clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after a wireless
consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps toward
investigation. The fifth aëroplane, which we had left at the
McMurdo Sound supply cache with Sherman and two sailors, was in good shape
and ready for instant use, and it seemed that the very emergency for which
it had been saved was now upon us. I got Sherman by wireless and
ordered him to join me with the plane and the two sailors at the southern
base as quickly as possible, the air conditions being apparently highly
favorable. We then talked over the personnel of the coming investigation
party, and decided that we would include all hands, together with the sledge
and dogs which I had kept with me. Even so great a load would not
be too much for one of the huge planes built to our special orders for
heavy machinery transportation. At intervals I still tried to reach
Lake with the wireless, but all to no purpose.
Sherman,
with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at seven-thirty; and reported
a quiet flight from several oints on the wing. They arrived at our
base at midnight, and all hands once discussed the next move. It
was risky business sailing over the antarctic in a single aëroplane
without any line of bases, but no one drew back from what seemed like the
plainest necessity. We turned in at two o'clock for a brief rest
after some preliminary loading of the plane, but were up again in four
hours to finish the loading and packing.
At 7:15
A.M., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under McTighe's pilotage
with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food supply, and other items
including the plane's wireless outfit. The atmosphere was clear,
fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature, and we anticipated very
little trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude designated by Lake
as the site of his camp. Our apprehensions were over what we might
find, or fail to find, at the end of our journey, for silence continued
to answer all calls dispatched to the camp.
Every
incident of that four-and-a-half hour flight is burned into my recollection
because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at
the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind
possesses through its accustomed conception of external nature and nature's
laws. Thenceforward the ten of us--but the student Danforth and myself
above all others--were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors
which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from
sharing with mankind in general if we could. The newspapers have printed
the bulletins we sent from the moving plane, telling of our nonstop course,
our two battles with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken
surface where Lake had sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before, and
our sight of a group of those strange fluffy snow cylinders noted by Amundsen
and Byrd as rolling in the wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau.
There came a point, though, when our sensations could not be conveyed in
any words the press would understand, and a latter point when we had to
adopt an actual rule of strict censorship.
The
sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones and pinnacles
ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined
plane. Despite out speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence;
hence that they that they must be infinitely far off, and visible only
because of their abnormal height. Little by little, however, they
rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare,
bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which
they inspired as seen in the reddist antarctic light against the provocative
background of iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle
there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential
revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the
pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex
gulfs of remote time, space, and ultradimensionality. I could not
help feeling that they were evil things--mountains of madness whose further
slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething,
half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague ethereal
beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders
of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death
of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
It was
young Danforth who drew out notice to the curious irregularities of the
higher mountain sky line--regularities like clinging fragments of perfect
cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified
his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial temples painted
by Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about
this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt
it in October when we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it
afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of
Archaean mythical resemblances; of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded
to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings. Mythologists
have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory of man - or of
his predecessors - is long and it may well be that certain tales have come
down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and
earlier than any human world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted
at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and
have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were an alien to mankind
as Tsathoggua itself. Leng, whatever in space or time it might brood,
was not a region I would care to be in or near, nor did I relish the proximity
of a world that had ever bread such ambiguous and Archaean monstrosities
as those Lake had just mentioned. At the moment I felt sorry that
I had ever read the abhorred Necronomicon, or talked so much with that
unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the university.
This
mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre mirage
which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we drew
near the mountains and began to make out the cumulative undulations of
the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding
weeks, some of them quite uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present
sample; but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing
symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls
and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice vapors above our
heads.
The
effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or
to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying
monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones,
sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here
and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped
disks; and strange beetling table-like constructions suggesting piles of
multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars
with each one overlapping the other beneath. There were composite
cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter
truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious
clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together
by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights,
and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its
sheer gigantism. The general type of mirage was not unlike some of
the wilder forms observed and drawn by the arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820,
but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks
soaring stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our
minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of
our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity
and infinitely evil portent.
I was
glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process the various
nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted, temporary forms of even
vaster hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to churning opalescence
we began to look earthward again, and saw that our journey's end was not
far off. The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzily up like a fearsome
rampart of giants, their curious regularities showing with startling clearness
even without a field glass We were over the lowest foothills ow,
and could see amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau
a couple of darkish spots which we took to be Lake's camp and boring.
The higher foothills shot up between five and six miles away, forming a
range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than Himalayan peaks
beyond them. At length Ropes--the student who had relieved McTighe
at the controls--began to head downward toward the left-hand dark spot
whose size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe sent out
the last uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our
expedition.
Everyone,
of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the rest of
our antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we send a guarded
report of the tragedy we found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out
of the whole Lake part by the frightful wind of the preceding day, or of
the night before that. Eleven known dead, young Gedney missing.
People pardoned our hazy lack of details through realization of the shock
the sad event must have caused us, and believed us when we explained that
the mangling action of the wind had rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable
for transportation outside. Indeed, I flatter myself that even in
the midst of our distress, utter bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror,
we scarcely went beyond the truth in any specific instance. The tremendous
significance lies in what we dared not tell; what I would not tell now
but for the need of warning others off from nameless terrors.
It is
a fact that the wind had brought dreadful havoc. Whether all could
have lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to
doubt. The storm, with its fury of madly driven ice particles, must
have been beyond anything our expedition had encountered before.
One aëroplane shelter--all, it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy
and inadequate state--was nearly pulverized--and the derrick at the distant
boring was entirely shaken to pieces. The exposed metal of the grounded
planes and drilling machinery was bruised into a high polish, and two of
the small tents were flattened despite their snow banking. Wooden
surfaces left out in the blaster were pitted and denuded of paint, and
all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated. It is
also true that we found none of the Archaean biological objects in a condition
to take outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals from a vast,
tumbled pile, including several of the greenish soapstone fragments whose
odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots caused so
many doubtful comparisons; and some fossil bones, among which were the
most typical of the curiously injured specimens.
None
of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow inclosure near the camp
being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though
the greater breakage on the side next the camp, which was not the windward
one, suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic beasts themselves.
All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to explain that the wind
may have blown them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-melting
machinery at the boring were too badly damaged to warrant salvage,
so we used them to choke up that subtly disturbing gateway to the past
which Lake had blasted. We likewise left at the camp the two most
shaken up of the planes; since our surviving party had only four real pilots--Sherman,
Danforth, McTighe, and Ropes--in all, with Danforth in a poor nervous shape
to navigate. We brought back all the books, scientific equipment,
and other incidentals we could find, though much was rather unaccountably
blown away. Spare tents and furs were either missing or badly out
of condition.
It was
approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane cruising had forced us to give Gedney
up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for
relaying; and I think we did well to keep it as calm and noncommittal as
we succeeded in doing. The most we said about agitation concerned
our dogs, whose frantic uneasiness near the biological specimens was to
be expected from poor Lake's accounts. We did not mention, I think,
their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish
soapstones and certain other objects in the disordered region--objects
including scientific instruments, aëroplanes, and machinery, both
at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had been loosened, moved, or
otherwise tampered with by winds that must have harbored singular curiosity
and investigativeness.
About
the fourteen biological specimens we were pardonably indefinite.
We said that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough
was left of them to prove Lake's description wholly and impressively accurate.
It was hard work keeping our personal emotions out of this matter--and
we did not mention numbers or say exactly how we had found those which
we did find. We had by that time agreed not to transmit anything
suggesting madness on the part of Lake's men, and it surely looked like
madness to find six imperfect monstrosities carefully buried upright in
nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds punched over with groups
of sots in patterns exactly those on the queer greenish soapstones bug
up frm Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens mentioned
by Lake seemed to have been completely blown away.
We were
careful, too, about the public's general peace of mind; hence Danforth
and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the next
day. It was the fact that only a radically lightened plane could
possibly cross a range of such height which mercifully limited that scouting
tour to the two of us. On our return at one A.M., Danforth was close
to hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff upper lip. It took no persuasion
to make him promise not to show our sketches and the other things we brought
away in our pockets, not to say anything more to the others than what we
had agreed to relay outside, and to hide our camera films for private development
later on; so that part of my present story will be as new to Pabodie, McTighe,
Ropes, Sherman, and the rest as it will be to the world in general.
Indeed, Danforth is closer mouthed than I: for he saw, or thinks he saw,
one thing he will not tell even me.
As all
know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent--a confirmation of Lake's
opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean slate and other very primal
crumpled strata unchanged since at least middle Caomanchian times; a conventional
comment on the regularity of the clinging cube and rampart formations;
a decision that the cave mouths indicated dissolved calcareous veins; a
conjecture that certain slopes and passes would permit of the scaling and
crossing of the entire range by seasoned mountaineers; and a remark that
the mysterious other side holds a loftly and immense superplateau as ancient
and unchanging as the mountains themselves--twenty thousand feet in elevation,
with grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin glacial layer
and with low gradual foothills between the general plateau surface and
the sheer precipices of the highest peaks.
This
body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely
satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen hours--a
longer time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitering, and rock-collecting
program called for--to a long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions,
and told tryly of our landing on the farther foothills. Fortunately
our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt any of the others
into emulating our flight. Had any tried to do that, I would have
used every ounce of my persuasion to stop them--and I do not know what
Danforth would have done. While we were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes,
McTighe, and Williamson had worked like beavers over Lake's tow best planes,
fitting them again for use despite the altogether unaccountable juggling
of their operative mechanism.
We decided
to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old base
as soon as possible. Even though indirect, that was the safest way
to work toward McMurdo Sound; for a straightline flight across the most
utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-dead continent would involve many
additional hazards. Further exploration was hardly feasible in view
of our tragic decimation and the ruin of our drilling machinery.
The doubts and horrors around us--which we did not reveal--made us wish
only to escape from this austral world of desolation and brooding madness
as swiftly as we could.
As the
public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without further
disasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the
next day--January 27th--after a swift nonstop flight; and on the 28th we
made McMurdo Sound in two laps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned
by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the ice shelf after we had
cleared the great plateau. In five days more, the Arkham and
Miskatonic,
with all hands and equipment on board, were shaking clear of the thickening
field ice and working up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria
Land looming westward against a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the
wind's wails into a wide-ranged musical piping which chilled my soul to
the quick. Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar
land behind us and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed
realm where life and death, space and time, had made black and blasphemous
alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on
the planet's scarce-cooled crust.
Since
our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic exploration,
and have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with splendid unity
and faithfulness. Even young Danforth, with his nervous breakdown,
has not flinched or babbled to his doctors--indeed, as I have said, there
is one thing he thinks he alone saw which he will not tell even me, though
I think it would help his psychological state if he would consent to do
so. It might explain and relieve much, though perhaps the thing was
no more than the delusive aftermath of an earlier shock. That is
the impression I gather after those rare, irresponsible moments when he
whispers disjointed things to me--things which he repudiated vehemently
as soon as he gets a grip on himself again.
It will
be hard work deterring other from the great white south, and some of our
efforts may directly harm our course by drawing inquiring notice.
We might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and
that the results we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the
same age-long pursuit of the unknown. Lake's reports of those biological
monstrosities had aroused naturalists and palaeontolgists to the highest
pitch, though we were sensible enough not to show the detached parts we
had taken from the actual buried specimens, or our photographs of those
specimens as they were found. We also refrained from showing the
more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish soapstones; while Danforth
and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or drew on the superplateau
across the range, and the crumpled thing we smoothed, studied in terror
, and brought away in our pockets.
But
now that Starkweather-Moore party is organizing, and with a thoroughness
far beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they
will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till
they bring up that which we know may end the world. So I must break
through all reticences at last--even about that ultimate, nameless thing
beyond the mountains of madness.
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