I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder,
terror, and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass
and saw what lay beyond. Of course, we must have had some natural
theory in the back of our heads to steady our faculties for the moment.
Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones
of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the fantastically symmetrical
wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps we even half thought
the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on first
approaching those mountains of madness.
We must have had some such normal notions to fall back upon as our
eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the
almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically
eurythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and pitted crests
above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its
thickest, and in places obviously thinner.
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish
violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here,
on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high,
and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less
than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the
vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of
mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and
artificial cause.
[Illustration: _The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable!
Some fiendish violation of natural law!_]
We had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned,
any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other
than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise, when man himself
could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time
when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial
death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this
Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which
cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous
city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That
damnable portent had had a material basis after all--there had been
some horizontal stratum of ice dust in the upper air, and this shocking
stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according
to the simple laws of reflection. Of course, the phantom had been
twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source
did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it
even more hideous and menacing than its distant image.
[Illustration: _It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the
mirage--in stark, objective reality!_]
Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers
and ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in
the hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of years it had brooded
there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland. "Corona Mundi--Roof of the
World----" All sorts of fantastic phrases sprang to our lips as we
looked dizzily down at the unbelievable spectacle.
I thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently
haunted me since my first sight of this dead antarctic world--of
the demonic plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men
of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their prehuman
implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of the _Necronomicon_, and of the
Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than formless
star spawn associated with that semientity.
* * * * *
For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with
very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and
left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it
from the actual mountain rim, we decided that we could see no thinning
at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through
which we had come. We had merely struck, at random, a limited part of
something of incalculable extent.
The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone
structures, linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and
ramparts which evidently formed its mountain outposts. These latter,
as well as the queer cave mouths, were as thick on the inner as on the
outer sides of the mountains.
The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of
walls from ten to one hundred and fifty feet in ice-clear height,
and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composed
mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and
sandstone--blocks in many cases as large as 4 × 6 × 8 feet--though in
several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed rock
of pre-Cambrian slate.
The buildings were far from equal in size, there being innumerable
honeycomb arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate
structures.
The general shape of these things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or
terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes,
clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar
sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly
suggested modern fortifications. The builders had made constant and
expert use of the principle of the arch, and domes had probably existed
in the city's heyday.
The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface
from where the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and
immemorial débris. Where the glaciation was transparent we could see
the lower parts of the gigantic piles, and we noticed the ice-preserved
stone bridges which connected the different towers at varying distances
above the ground. On the exposed walls we could detect the scarred
places where other and higher bridges of the same sort had existed.
Closer inspection revealed countless largish windows; some of which
were closed with shutters of a petrified material originally wood,
though most gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion.
Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless, and with uneven though
wind-rounded upper edges; whilst others, of a more sharply conical or
pyramidal model or else protected by higher surrounding structures,
preserved intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and
pitting. With the field glass we could barely make out what seemed to
be sculptural decorations in horizontal bands--decorations including
those curious groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones
now assumed a vastly larger significance.
In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice sheet
deeply riven from various geologic causes. In other places the
stonework was worn down to the very level of the glaciation. One
broad swath, extending from the plateau's interior to a cleft in the
foothills about a mile to the left of the pass we had traversed, was
wholly free from buildings. It probably represented, we concluded,
the course of some great river which in Tertiary times--millions
of years ago--had poured through the city and into some prodigious
subterranean abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly, this was
above all a region of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond
human penetration.
* * * * *
Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing
this monstrous survival from æons we had thought prehuman, I can only
wonder that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium which we did.
Of course, we knew that something--chronology, scientific theory, or
our own consciousness--was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to
guide the plane, observe many things quite minutely, and take a careful
series of photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good
stead.
In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all
my bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant curiosity
to fathom more of this age-old secret--to know what sort of beings
had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what
relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a
concentration of life could have had.
For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the
primary nucleus and center of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of
earth's history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the
most obscure and distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos
of terrene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled
out of apedom.
Here sprawled a Palæogæan megalopolis compared with which the fabled
Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoë in the
land of Lomar are recent things of to-day--not even of yesterday;
a megalopolis ranking with such whispered prehuman blasphemies as
Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City of
Arabia Deserta.
As we flew above that tangle of stark Titan towers my imagination
sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms of fantastic
associations--even weaving links betwixt this lost world and some of my
own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp.
The plane's fuel tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had
been only partly filled; hence we now had to exert caution in our
explorations. Even so, however, we covered an enormous extent of
ground--or rather, air--after swooping down to a level where the wind
became virtually negligible.
There seemed to be no limit to the mountain range, or to the length
of the frightful stone city which bordered its inner foothills. Fifty
miles of flight in each direction showed no major change in the
labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpselike through the
eternal ice.
There were, though, some highly absorbing diversifications; such as
the carvings on the canyon where that broad river had once pierced the
foothills and approached its sinking place in the great range.
The headlands at the stream's entrance had been boldly carved into
Cyclopean pylons; and something about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs
stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semiremembrances in both
Danforth and me.
We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public
squares, and noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp
hill rose, it was generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling
stone edifice; but there were at least two exceptions. Of these latter,
one was too badly weathered to disclose what had been on the jutting
eminence, while the other still bore a fantastic conical monument
carved out of the solid rock and roughly resembling such things as the
well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra.
Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was
not of infinite width, even though its length along the foothills
seemed endless. After about thirty miles the grotesque stone buildings
began to thin out, and in ten more miles we came to an unbroken waste
virtually without signs of sentient artifice. The course of the river
beyond the city seemed marked by a broad, depressed line, while the
land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness, seeming to slope slightly
upward as it receded in the mist-hazed west.
So far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an
attempt at entering some of the monstrous structures would have been
inconceivable. Accordingly, we decided to find a smooth place on the
foothills near our navigable pass, there grounding the plane and
preparing to do some exploration on foot.
Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with a scattering of
ruins, low flying soon disclosed an ample number of possible landing
places. Selecting that nearest to the pass, since our next flight would
be across the great range and back to camp, we succeeded about twelve
thirty p.m. in coming down on a smooth, hard snow field wholly devoid
of obstacles and well adapted to a swift and favorable take-off later
on.
* * * * *
It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for
so brief a time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this
level; hence we merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged,
and that the vital parts of the mechanism were guarded against the cold.
For our foot journey we discarded the heaviest of our flying furs, and
took with us a small outfit consisting of pocket compass, hand camera,
light provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper, geologist's hammer
and chisel, specimen bags, coil of climbing rope, and powerful electric
torches with extra batteries; this equipment having been carried in the
plane on the chance that we might be able to effect a landing, take
ground pictures, make drawings and topographical sketches, and obtain
rock specimens from some bare slope, outcropping, or mountain cave.
Fortunately, we had a supply of extra paper to tear up, place in a
spare specimen bag, and use on the ancient principle of hare and hounds
for marking our course in any interior mazes we might be able to
penetrate. This had been brought in case we found some cave system with
air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the
usual rock-chipping method of trail blazing.
Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow, toward the
stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west,
we felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on
approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously.
True, we had become visually familiar with the incredible secret
concealed by the barrier peaks; yet the prospect of actually entering
primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years
ago--before any known race of men could have existed--was none the
less awesome and potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic
abnormality.
Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made
exertion somewhat more difficult than usual, both Danforth and I found
ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which
might fall to our lot.
It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level
with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge,
roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline,
and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet. For this
latter we headed; and when at last we were actually able to touch
its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an
unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten æons normally
closed to our species.
This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps three hundred feet from
point to point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular
size, averaging 6 x 8 feet in surface. There was a row of arched
loopholes or windows about four feet wide and five feet high, spaced
quite symmetrically along the points of the star and at its inner
angles, and with the bottoms about four feet from the glaciated surface.
Looking through these, we could see that the masonry was fully five
feet thick, that there were no partitions remaining within, and that
there were traces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior
walls--facts we had indeed guessed before, when flying low over this
rampart and others like it. Though lower parts must have originally
existed, all traces of such things were now wholly obscured by the deep
layer of ice and snow at this point.
We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher
the nearly effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb
the glaciated floor. Our orientation flights had indicated that many
buildings in the city proper were less ice-choked, and that we might
perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading down to the true ground
level if we entered those structures still roofed at the top.
Before we left the rampart we photographed it carefully, and studied
its mortarless Cyclopean masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished
that Pabodie were present, for his engineering knowledge might have
helped us guess how such titanic blocks could have been handled in that
unbelievably remote age when the city and its outskirts were built up.
* * * * *
The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind
shrieking vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the
background, was something of which the smallest details will always
remain engraved on my mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any
human beings but Danforth and me conceive such optical effects.
Between us and the churning vapors of the west lay that monstrous
tangle of dark stone towers, its outré and incredible forms impressing
us afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid stone,
and were it not for the photographs I would still doubt that such a
thing could be. The general type of masonry was identical with that
of the rampart we had examined; but the extravagant shapes which this
masonry took in its urban manifestations were past all description.
Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless
variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There
were geometrical forms for which an Euclid could scarcely find a
name--cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces
of every sort of provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous
enlargements, broken columns in curious groups, and five-pointed or
five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness.
As we drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the
ice sheet, and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that connected
the crazily sprinkled structures at various heights. Of orderly streets
there seemed to be none, the only broad open swath being a mile to the
left, where the ancient river had doubtless flowed through the town
into the mountains.
Our field glasses showed the external, horizontal bands of nearly
effaced sculptures and dot groups to be very prevalent, and we could
half imagine what the city must once have looked like--even though most
of the roofs and tower tops had necessarily perished.
As a whole, it had been a complex tangle of twisted lanes and alleys,
all of them deep canyons, and some little better than tunnels because
of the overhanging masonry or overarching bridges.
Now, outspread below us, it loomed like a dream phantasy against a
westward mist through whose northern end the low, reddish antarctic sun
of early afternoon was struggling to shine; and when, for a moment,
that sun encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into
temporary shadow, the effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never
hope to depict. Even the faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind in
the great mountain passes behind us took on a wilder note of purposeful
malignity.
The last stage of our descent to the town was unusually steep and
abrupt, and a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led
us to think that an artificial terrace had once existed there. Under
the glaciation, we believed, there must be a flight of steps or its
equivalent.
When at last we plunged into the town itself, clambering over fallen
masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height
of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became
such that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained.
Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began making some offensively
irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp--which I resented
all the more because I could not help sharing certain conclusions
forced upon us by many features of this morbid survival from nightmare
antiquity.
The speculations worked on his imagination, too; for in one
place--where a débris-littered alley turned a sharp corner--he insisted
that he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like;
whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle, imaginary sound
from some undefined point--a muffled musical piping, he said, not
unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves, yet somehow disturbingly
different.
The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and
of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister
suggestiveness we could not escape, and gave us a touch of terrible
subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared
and dwelt in this unhallowed place.
Nevertheless, our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly
dead, and we mechanically carried out our program of chipping specimens
from all the different rock types represented in the masonry. We wished
a rather full set in order to draw better conclusions regarding the age
of the place.
Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to date from later than the
Jurassic and Comanchean periods, nor was any piece of stone in the
entire place of a greater recency than the Pliocene age. In stark
certainty, we were wandering amidst a death which had reigned at least
five hundred thousand years, and in all probability even longer.
* * * * *
As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped
at all available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance
possibilities. Some were above our reach, whilst others led only into
ice-choked ruins as unroofed and barren as the rampart on the hill.
One, though spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless
abyss without visible means of descent. Now and then we had a chance to
study the petrified wood of a surviving shutter, and were impressed by
the fabulous antiquity implied in the still discernible grain. These
things had come from Mesozoic gymnosperms and conifers--especially
Cretaceous cycads--and from fan palms and early angiosperms of plainly
Tertiary date. Nothing definitely later than the Pliocene could be
discovered.
In the placing of these shutters--whose edges showed the former
presence of queer and long-vanished hinges--usage seemed to be
varied--some being on the outer and some on the inner side of the
deep embrasures. They seemed to have become wedged in place, thus
surviving the rusting of their former and probably metallic fixtures
and fastenings.
After a time we came across a row of windows--in the bulges of a
colossal five-edged cone of undamaged apex--which led into a vast,
well-preserved room with stone flooring; but these were too high in
the room to permit descent without a rope. We had a rope with us,
but did not wish to bother with this twenty-foot drop unless obliged
to--especially in this thin plateau air where great demands were made
upon the heart action.
This enormous room was probably a hall or concourse of some sort, and
our electric torches showed bold, distinct, and potentially startling
sculptures arranged round the walls in broad, horizontal bands
separated by equally broad strips of conventional arabesques. We took
careful note of this spot, planning to enter here unless a more easily
gained interior was encountered.
Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an
archway about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end
of an aërial bridge which had spanned an alley about five feet above
the present level of glaciation. These archways, of course, were flush
with upper-story floors, and in this case one of the floors still
existed.
The building thus accessible was a series of rectangular terraces
on our left facing westward. That across the alley, where the other
archway yawned, was a decrepit cylinder with no windows and with
a curious bulge about ten feet above the aperture. It was totally
dark inside, and the archway seemed to open on a well of illimitable
emptiness.
Heaped débris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly
easy, yet for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the
long-wished chance. For though we had penetrated into this tangle of
archaic mystery, it required fresh resolution to carry us actually
inside a complete and surviving building of a fabulous elder world
whose nature was becoming more and more hideously plain to us.
In the end, however, we made the plunge, and scrambled up over the
rubble into the gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate
slabs, and seemed to form the outlet of a long, high corridor with
sculptured walls.
Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and realizing
the probable complexity of the nest of apartments within, we decided
that we must begin our system of hare-and-hound trail blazing. Hitherto
our compasses, together with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain
range between the towers in our rear, had been enough to prevent our
losing our way; but from now on, the artificial substitute would be
necessary.
Accordingly we reduced our extra paper to shreds of suitable size,
placed these in a bag to be carried by Danforth, and prepared to use
them as economically as safety would allow. This method would probably
gain us immunity from straying, since there did not appear to be any
strong air currents inside the primordial masonry. If such should
develop, or if our paper supply should give out, we could of course
fall back on the more secure though more tedious and retarding method
of rock chipping.
Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible
to guess without a trial. The close and frequent connection of the
different buildings made it likely that we might cross from one to
another on bridges underneath the ice, except where impeded by local
collapses and geologic rifts, for very little glaciation seemed to have
entered the massive constructions.
Almost all the areas of transparent ice had revealed the submerged
windows as tightly shuttered, as if the town had been left in that
uniform state until the glacial sheet came to crystallize the lower
part for all succeeding time. Indeed, one gained a curious impression
that this place had been deliberately closed and deserted in some dim,
bygone æon, rather than overwhelmed by any sudden calamity or even
gradual decay. Had the coming of the ice been foreseen, and had a
nameless population left _en masse_ to seek a less doomed abode?
The precise physiographic conditions attending the formation of the
ice sheet at this point would have to wait for later solution. It had
not, very plainly, been a grinding drive. Perhaps the pressure of
accumulated snows had been responsible, and perhaps some flood from
the river, or from the bursting of some ancient glacial dam in the
great range, had helped to create the special state now observable.
Imagination could conceive almost anything in connection with this
place.