It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go
back to Lake's camp and what we really found there--and to that other
thing beyond the awful mountain wall.
I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the
disarranged machinery, the varied uneasiness of our dogs, the missing
sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of
Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological specimens, strangely
sound in texture for all their structural injuries, from a world forty
million years dead. I do not recall whether I mentioned that upon
checking up the canine bodies we found one dog missing. We did not
think much about that till later--indeed, only Danforth and I have
thought of it at all.
The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies,
and to certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and
incredible kind of rationale to the apparent chaos.
At the time, I tried to keep the men's minds off those points; for
it was so much simpler--so much more normal--to lay everything to an
outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake's party. From the look
of things, that demon mountain wind must have been enough to drive
any man mad in the midst of this center of all earthly mystery and
desolation.
The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the
bodies--men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind
of conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether
inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each case
come from strangulation or laceration.
The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for the state of their
ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within.
It had been set some distance from the camp because of the hatred of
the animals for those hellish archæan organisms, but the precaution
seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in that monstrous
wind, behind flimsy walls of insufficient height, they must have
stampeded--whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle,
increasing odor emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say.
* * * * *
But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough.
Perhaps I had better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at
last--though with a categorical statement of opinion, based on the
first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and
myself, that the then missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the
loathsome horrors we found.
I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must
add that some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious,
cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was the same with dogs and men.
All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had
their most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed, as by a careful
butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of salt--taken from
the ravaged provision chests on the planes--which conjured up the most
horrible associations.
The thing had occurred in one of the crude aëroplane shelters from
which the plane had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced
all tracks which could have supplied any plausible theory. Scattered
bits of clothing, roughly slashed from the human incision subjects,
hinted no clues.
It is useless to bring up the half impression of certain faint snow
prints in one shielded corner of the ruined inclosure--because that
impression did not concern human prints at all, but was clearly
mixed up with all the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake had been
giving throughout the preceding weeks. One had to be careful of one's
imagination in the lee of those overshadowing mountains of madness.
As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in
the end. When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs
and two men; but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent, which we entered
after investigating the monstrous graves, had something to reveal.
It was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the primal
monstrosity had been removed from the improvised table. Indeed, we had
already realized that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried
things we had found--the one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful
odor--must represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake
had tried to analyze.
On and around that laboratory table were strewn other things, and it
did not take long for us to guess that those things were the carefully,
though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I
shall spare the feelings of survivors by omitting mention of the man's
identity.
Lake's anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidences
of their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though
around it we found a curious litter of matches. We buried the human
parts beside the other ten men, and the canine parts with the other
thirty-five dogs. Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory
table, and on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated books scattered
near it, we were much too bewildered to speculate.
This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were
equally perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the
eight uninjured biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain
instruments, illustrated technical and scientific books, writing
materials, electric torches and batteries, food and fuel, heating
apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like, was utterly beyond
sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink blots on
certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien fumbling
and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices
both at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly
disordered machinery.
Then, too, there was the upsetting of the larder, the disappearance
of certain staples, and the jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried
open in the most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely places. The
profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or spent, formed
another minor enigma--as did the two or three tent cloths and fur suits
which we found lying about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings
conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations.
The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies, and the crazy burial
of the damaged archæan specimens, were all of a piece with this
apparent disintegrative madness. In view of just such an eventuality
as the present one, we carefully photographed all the main evidences
of insane disorder at the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress
our pleas against the departure of the proposed Starkweather-Moore
Expedition.
* * * * *
Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph
and open the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds.
We could not help noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds,
with their clusters of grouped dots, to poor Lake's descriptions of the
strange greenish soapstones; and when we came on some of the soapstones
themselves in the great mineral pile we found the likeness very close
indeed.
The whole general formation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably
suggestive of the starfish head of the archæan entities; and we agreed
that the suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitized minds
of Lake's overwrought party.
For madness--centering in Gedney as the only possible surviving
agent--was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far
as spoken utterance was concerned; though I will not be so naïve as
to deny that each of us may have harbored wild guesses which sanity
forbade him to formulate completely.
Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive aëroplane cruise over
all the surrounding territory in the afternoon, sweeping the horizon
with field glasses in quest of Gedney and of the various missing
things; but nothing came to light.
The party reported that the titan-barrier range extended endlessly to
right and left alike, without any diminution in height or essential
structure. On some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart
formations were bolder and plainer, having doubly fantastic similitudes
to Roerich-painted Asian hill ruins. The distribution of cryptical cave
mouths on the black snow-denuded summits seemed roughly even as far as
the range could be traced.
In spite of all the prevailing horrors we were left with enough sheer
scientific zeal and adventurousness to wonder about the unknown realm
beyond those mysterious mountains.
As our guarded messages stated, we rested at midnight after our day of
terror and bafflement--but not without a tentative plan for one or more
range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with aërial camera
and geologist's outfit, beginning the following morning.
It was decided that Danforth and I try it first, and we awaked at seven
a.m. intending an early trip; though heavy winds--mentioned in our
brief bulletin to the outside world--delayed our start till nearly nine
o'clock.
I have already repeated the noncommittal story we told the men at
camp--and relayed outside--after our return sixteen hours later.
It is now my terrible duty to amplify this account by filling in
the merciful blanks with hints of what we really saw in that hidden
transmontane world--hints of the revelations which have finally driven
Danforth to a nervous collapse.
I wish he would add a really frank word about the thing which he thinks
he alone saw--even though it was probably a nervous delusion--and which
was perhaps the last straw that put him where he is; but he is firm
against that. All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed whispers
about what set him shrieking as the plane soared back through the
wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and tangible shock which I
shared.
This will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving elder
horrors in what I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling
with the inner antarctic--or at least from prying too deeply beneath
the surface of that ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and unhuman,
æon-cursed desolation--the responsibility for unnamable and perhaps
immeasurable evils will not be mine.
* * * * *
Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon
flight and checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest
available pass in the range lay somewhat to the right of us, within
sight of camp, and about twenty-three thousand or twenty-four thousand
feet above sea-level. For this point, then, we first headed in the
lightened plane as we embarked on our flight of discovery.
The camp itself, on foothills which sprang from a high continental
plateau, was some twelve thousand feet in altitude; hence the
actual height increase necessary was not so vast as it might seem.
Nevertheless we were acutely conscious of the rarefied air and intense
cold as we rose; for, on account of visibility conditions, we had
to leave the cabin windows open. We were dressed, of course, in our
heaviest furs.
As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the
line of crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more
and more the curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and
thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich.
The ancient and wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all of
Lake's bulletins, and proved that these pinnacles had been towering
up in exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in earth's
history--perhaps over fifty million years. How much higher they had
once been, it was futile to guess; but everything about this strange
region pointed to obscure atmospheric influences unfavorable to
change, and calculated to retard the usual climatic processes of rock
disintegration.
But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave
mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a
field glass and took aërial photographs while Danforth drove; and at
times I relieved him at the controls--though my aviation knowledge was
purely an amateur's--in order to let him use the binoculars.
We could easily see that much of the material of the things was a
lightish archæan quartzite, unlike any formation visible over broad
areas of the general surface; and that their regularity was extreme and
uncanny to an extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted.
As he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold
æons of savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough
material had saved them from obliteration. Many parts, especially
those closest to the slopes, seemed identical in substance with the
surrounding rock surface.
The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Macchu Picchu in
the Andes, or the primal foundation walls of Kish as dug up by the
Oxford-Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and I
obtained that occasional impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which
Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll.
How to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and
I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have
strange regularities--like the famous Giants' Causeway in Ireland--but
this stupendous range, despite Lake's original suspicion of smoking
cones, was above all else nonvolcanic in evident structure.
The curious cave mouths, near which the odd formation seemed most
abundant, presented another, albeit a lesser puzzle because of their
regularity of outline. They were, as Lake's bulletin had said, often
approximately square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had
been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand. Their numerousness
and wide distribution were remarkable, and suggested that the whole
region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata.
Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within the caverns, but
we saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites.
Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures
seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the
slight cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual
patterns.
Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the
camp, he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling
groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so
hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above those six
buried monstrosities.
* * * * *
We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along
toward the relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we
occasionally looked down at the snow and ice of the land route,
wondering whether we could have attempted the trip with the simpler
equipment of earlier days.
Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the terrain was far from difficult
as such things go; and that despite the crevasses and other bad spots
it would not have been likely to deter the sledges of a Scott, a
Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appeared to lead up to
wind-bared passes with unusual continuity, and upon reaching our chosen
pass we found that its case formed no exception.
Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest
and peer out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper;
even though we had no cause to think the regions beyond the range
essentially different from those already seen and traversed. The touch
of evil mystery in these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of
opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and
attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words. Rather was it
an affair of vague psychological symbolism and æsthetic association--a
thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths
lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes.
Even the wind's burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity;
and for a second it seemed that the composite sound included a bizarre
musical whistling, or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in
and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave mouths. There was a cloudy
note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable
as any of the other dark impressions.
We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of twenty-three thousand
five hundred and seventy feet according to the aneroid; and had left
the region of clinging snow definitely below us. Up here were only
dark, bare rock slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers--but with
those provocative cubes, ramparts, and echoing cave mouths to add a
portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and the dreamlike.
Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the one
mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed to be
half lost in a queer antarctic haze--such a haze, perhaps, as had been
responsible for Lake's early notion of volcanism.
The pass loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept between its
jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a sky fretted with
swirling vapors and lighted by the low polar sun--the sky of that
mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.
A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth
and I, unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind
that raced through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled
engines, exchanged eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last
few feet, we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the
unsampled secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth.