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 thins 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 either on their vast membranous wings--thus oddly confirming
some curious hill folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian colleague.
They had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and
fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate
devices employing unknown principles of energy. Evidently their scientific
and mechanical knowledge far surpassed man's today, though they made use
of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to.
Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of
mechanized life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects
emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness of organization
and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to live on a
high plane without the more specialized fruits of artificial manufacture,
and even without garments, except 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 heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were
without a 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 ell 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 constructions.
As we studied the architecture of all these sculptured palaeogean cities,
including that whose aeon-dead corridors we were even then traversing,
we were impressed by a curious coincidence which we had 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 needle-like 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 tens of thousands of years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes across
the unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached poor Lake's
ill-fated camp.
Of the
life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them migrated
to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had continued
the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles,
and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the usual
way--the writing 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,
pierced 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 moves 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
coordination--ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and
other manual operations.
The
toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific
pressure of the deepest sea bottoms appeared powerless of the deepest sea
bottoms appearing powerless to harm them. Very few seemed to die
at all except by violence, and their burial places were limited.
The fact that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed
inscribed mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me witch made a fresh
pause and recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it.
The beings multiplied by means of spores--like vegetable pteridophytes,
as Lake had suspected--but, owing to their prodigious toughness, and longevity,
and subsequent lack of replacement needs, they did not encourage that 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 aesthetic life
was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs
and institutions which I shall describe more fully in my coming monograph.
These varied slightly according to sea or land 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 absorbed
certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating, breathing, or
heating 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 co-dwellers--congenial
mental association. In furnishing their homes they kept everything
in the center of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall space 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 manufacture 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, wince 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 paleontology.
The
persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes and
convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of miraculous.
Though few or none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the
Archaean 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 no
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 aeons 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 the land mass
as cracked and drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward,
uphold in a striking way the theories of continental drift 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 fabulous prehuman spawn of Cthulhu--son
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 archaeologist
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 of 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 in 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 and atomic 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 fin the form of a new
invasion from outer space--this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures--creatures
the 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 ben 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 with 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 non-terrestrial 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 cities figure persistently in certain obscure legends.
The
changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with startling
vividness in may 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 complementary 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 world of an hundred million or more
years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destines later to separate
Africa from the once continuous realm 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 today appeared
quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North American
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 cast lines probably made during long exploration flight on those
fanlike membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old
Ones.
Destruction
of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal rending of
continents, the seismic convolutions of land or sea bottoms, 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
cent of the race--built early in the Cretacous 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 thrust up to light after long epochs in the course
of the general crumbling of strata.
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