VI
It would be cumbrous to give
a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings inside that cavernous,
aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry - that monstrous lair of elder secrets
which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread
of human feet. This is especially true because so much of the horrible
drama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings.
Our flashlight photographs of those carvings will do much toward proving
the truth of what we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had
not a larger film supply with us. As it was, we made crude notebook
sketches of certain salient features after all our films were used up.
The
building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness,
and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic
past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls,
but on the lower levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine
complexity, involving curiously irregular difference in floor levels, characterized
the entire arrangement; and we should certainly have been lost at the very
outset but for the trail of torn paper left behind us. We decided
to explore the more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence climbed aloft
in the maze for a distance of some one hundred feet, to where the topmost
tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the polar sky.
Ascent was effected over the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps or
inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of stairs. The rooms
we encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from
five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. It might be safe
to say that their general average was about 30 x 30 feet in floor area,
and 20 feet in height, though many larger apartments existed. After
thoroughly examining the upper regions and the glacial level, we descended,
story by story, into the submerged part, where indeed we soon saw we were
in a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages probably leading
over unlimited areas outside this particular building. The Cyclopean
massiveness and gigantism 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
car-touches containing oddly patterned groups of dots would be sunk along
one of the arabesque bands.
The
technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved
to the highest degree of civilized mastery, though utterly alien in every
detail to any known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution
no sculpture I have ever seen could approach it. The minutest details
of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing
vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the conventional
designs were marvels of skillful intricacy. The arabesques displayed
a profound use of mathematical principles, and were made up of obscurely
symmetrical curves and angles based on the quantity of five. The
pictorial bands followed a highly formalized tradition, and involved a
peculiar treatment of perspective, but had an artistic force that moved
us profoundly, notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods.
Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross
section with 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 aeons 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-mindlessness 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 of an enlarged
scale - these things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what
we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dadoes. 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, 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 detris, litter, and debris, but farther down this condition
decreased. In some of the lower chambers and corridors there was
little more than gritty dust and 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 littered as
the upper ones. A central court--as in other structures we had seen
from the air--saved the inner regions from total darkness; so that we seldom
had to use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying
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
aeon-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 ti to each other. There
could be no further merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which
had built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago,
when man's ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs
roamed the tropical 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 Archaean natural object which had so patently
embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the decorative motifs of Minoan
Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of
Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribes some chosen
totem animal. But this lone refuge was now stripped from us, and
we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking realization which
the reader of these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can
scarcely bear to write it down in black and white even now, but perhaps
that will not be necessary.
The
things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of
dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs
were new and almost brainless objects--but the builders of 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 in 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 phrases of racial
history, had evidently been favorites with different decorators or dwellers.
Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same theme proved useful in
settling debatable points and filling 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.
Go to Next Chapter.....
