VIII
Naturally,
Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly personal
sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district in which we
were. Of this local material there was naturally a vast abundance;
and on the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find
a house of very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a neighboring
rift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the story of
the region much beyond the period of 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 gave us a fresh
immediate objective.
Certainly,
we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all 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°, E. 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 humor 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 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
Comanchian Age, a frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the
most appalling din and chaos--the 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 ne has been able to land and climb those hills.
I am not as skeptical about old tales and fears as I used to be, and I
do not laugh now at the prehuman sculptor's notion that lightning paused
meaningfully now and then at each of the brooding crest, 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
to 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,
aeon-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 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 though 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 along 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 into
the hollow hills to the neighboring black abyss of subterrene 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 river
course, and the other perhaps twice that distance in the opposite direction.
The
abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places, but
the Old Ones built their new city 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 head could
ensure 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 kinfolk elsewhere,
and how they 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
quantity 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 mode 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 displayed 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 aeon-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 dadoes 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 bene 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 has 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?
Has 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 wold of the north? Could
one be sure of what might or might no linger, even to this day, in the
lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth's deepest waters? Those
things had seemingly ben able to withstand any amount of pressure--and
men of the sea had 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 faraway 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.
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