XII
Danforth and I have recollections
of emerging into the great sculptured hemisphere and of threading our backtrail
though the Cyclopean rooms and corridors of the dead city; yet these are
purely dream fragments involving no memory of volition, details or physical
exertion. It was as if we floated in a nebulous world or dimension
without time, causation, or orientation. The gray half daylight of
the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; bu we did not go near those
cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog. They have
a strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end of this planet will
find them still undisturbed.
It was
while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we first felt the
terrible fatigue and short breath which our race through the thin plateau
air had produced; but not even fear of collapse could make us pause before
reaching the normal outer realm of sun and sky. 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 the higher stonework rising westward,
and the brooding peaks of the great mountains showing beyond the more crumbled
structures toward the east. The low antarctic sun of midnight peered
redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and
the terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker
by contrast with such relatively known and accustomed things as the features
of the polar landscape. The sky above was a churning and opalescent
mass of tenuous ice-vapors, and the cold clutched at our vitals.
Wearily resting the outfit-bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout
our desperate flight, we re-buttoned our heavy garments for the stumbling
climb down the mound and the walk through the aeon-old stone maze to the
foothills where our aëroplane waited. Of what had set us fleeing
from that darkness of earth's secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing
at all.
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 the 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 bizaree 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 tableland, 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
violent 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 Archaean secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who
feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living thing on earth,
but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams
across the plains in the polar night--beyond doubt the unknown archetype
of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof
primal legends hint evasively.
If the
sculptured maps and pictures in that pre-human city had told truly, these
cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than 300 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. Their height, then, must have
been tremendous beyond all known comparison--carrying them up into tenuous
atmospheric strata people by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely
lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls. 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 slopes--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 thier 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
long before we 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 Roerick; and when we thought
of the damnable honeycombs inside them, and of the frightful amorphous
entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming way 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
takeoff over the nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry
spread out as it had done when first we saw it--so short, yet infinitely
long, a time ago--and we began rising and turning to test the wind for
our crossing through the pass. At a very high level there must have
been a great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds of the zenith were
doing all sorts of fantastic things; but at 24,000 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 though 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--resolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountain-top
vapor, and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses' men off the
Siren's cost to keep that disturbing wind-piping from my consciousness.
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 awe had made as we prepared to
leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not
for people to know and discuss lightly--and I would not speak of them now
but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore expedition, and
others, at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and
safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed
depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life,
and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black
lairs to newer and wider conquests.
All
that Danforth had 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-honycombed mountains of madness which
we crossed; but a single fantastic, demoniac glimpse, among the churning
zenith clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains
which the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probably that
the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed
through, and of the actual though unrecognized mirage of the dead transmontane
city experienced near Lake's camp the day before; but it was so real to
Danforth that he suffers from it still. 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 cylinder," "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 to 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 horros till after
his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could
never have seen so much in one instantaneious 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!"
Finis
