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 condition in the disturbed air to the
westward seemed to prevent communication. 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
two 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 points on the wing.
They arrived at our base at midnight, and all hands at 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 seven fifteen a.m., January 25th, we started 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 later 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 every one to the windows of
the great cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in
gaining prominence; hence we knew 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 phantasy which they inspired as seen
in the reddish 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 farther 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 æon-long death of this untrodden and
unfathomed austral world.
* * * * *
It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities
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 temple ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and
strangely painted by Roerich.
There was indeed something hauntingly Roerichlike 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 archæan 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 as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself.
Leng, wherever 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 bred such ambiguous and archæan 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 as 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,
tablelike constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular
slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one
overlapping the one beneath.
There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting
cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and
occasional needlelike 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
giganticism.
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 now, 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.
Every one, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of
the rest of our antarctic sojourn.
Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report of the tragedy we
found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole Lake party
by the frightful wind of the preceding day, or of the night before
that. There were eleven known dead, young Gedney was 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 wrought 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 blast 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 archæan 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 to 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 four 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 dots in patterns exactly like those on
the queer greenish soapstones dug up from 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 that 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 archæan
slate and other very primal crumpled strata unchanged since at least
middle Comanchean time, a conventional comment on the regularity of the
clinging cube and rampart formations, a decision that the cave mouths
indicate 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 lofty 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 truly 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 two 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 straight-line flight
across the most utterly unknown stretches of the æon-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, have 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 repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on
himself again.
It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and
some of our efforts may directly harm our cause 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 palæontologists 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 things 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.