VI.

It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of

our wanderings inside that cavernous, æon-dead honeycomb of primal

masonry--that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the

first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet.

This is especially true because so much of the horrible drama and

revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings.

Our flash-light photographs of those carvings will do much toward

proving the truth of what we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable

that we had not a larger film supply with us. As it was, we made crude

notebook sketches of certain salient features after all our films were

used up.

The building which we had entered was one of great size and

elaborateness, and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of

that nameless geologic past. The inner partitions were less massive

than the outer walls, but on the lower levels were excellently

preserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular

differences in floor levels, characterized the entire arrangement; and

we should certainly have been lost at the very outset but for the trail

of torn paper left behind us.

We decided to explore the more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence

climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of some one hundred feet, to

where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to

the polar sky. Ascent was effected over the steep, transversely ribbed

stone ramps or inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of

stairs.

The rooms we encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions,

ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. It

might be safe to say that their general average was about 30 x 30 feet

in floor area, and twenty feet in height, though many larger apartments

existed.

After thoroughly examining the upper regions and the glacial level

we descended, story by story, into the submerged part, where indeed

we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers and

passages probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular

building.

The Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism of everything about us became

curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply

unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and

constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon

realized, from what the carvings revealed, that this monstrous city was

many million years old.

We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous

balancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the function

of the arch was clearly much relied on. The rooms we visited were

wholly bare of all portable contents, a circumstance which sustained

our belief in the city's deliberate desertion. The prime decorative

feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture, which

tended to run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide and

arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width

given over to geometrical arabesques.

There were exceptions to this rule of arrangement, but its

preponderance was overwhelming. Often, however, a series of smooth

cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of dots would be sunk

along one of the arabesque bands.

* * * * *

The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and æsthetically

evolved to the highest degree of civilized mastery, though utterly

alien in every detail to any known art tradition of the human race.

In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have ever seen could approach

it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life,

were rendered with astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the

carvings; whilst the conventional designs were marvels of skillful

intricacy.

The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical principles, and

were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based on the

quantity of five.

The pictorial bands followed a highly formalized tradition, and

involved a peculiar treatment of perspective, but had an artistic force

that moved us profoundly notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast

geologic periods.

Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross

section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical

psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to

try to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who

see our photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain

grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists.

The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines, whose

depth on unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When

cartouches with dot groups appeared--evidently as inscriptions in some

unknown and primordial language and alphabet--the depression of the

smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps

a half inch more. The pictorial bands were in countersunk low relief,

their background being depressed about two inches from the original

wall surface.

In some specimens marks of a former coloration could be detected,

though for the most part the untold æons had disintegrated and banished

any pigments which may have been applied. The more one studied the

marvelous technique the more one admired the things. Beneath their

strict conventionalization one could grasp the minute and accurate

observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very

conventions themselves served to symbolize and accentuate the real

essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated.

We felt, too, that besides these recognizable excellences there

were others lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions. Certain

touches here and there gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli

which another mental and emotional background, and a fuller or

different sensory equipment, might have made of profound and poignant

significance to us.

The subject matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of

the vanished epoch of their creation, and contained a large proportion

of evident history. It is this abnormal historic-mindedness of the

primal race--a chance circumstance operating, through coincidence,

miraculously in our favor--which made the carvings so awesomely

informative to us, and which caused us to place their photography and

transcription above all other considerations.

In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied by the presence of

maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs on an enlarged

scale--these things giving a naïve and terrible corroboration to what

we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dados.

In hinting at what the whole revealed, I can only hope that my account

will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of

those who believe me at all. It would be tragic if any were to be

allured to that realm of death and horror by the very warning meant to

discourage them.

* * * * *

Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive

twelve-foot doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden

planks--elaborately carved and polished--of the actual shutters and

doors. All metal fixtures had long ago vanished, but some of the doors

remained in place and had to be forced aside as we progressed from room

to room.

Window frames with odd transparent panes--mostly elliptical--survived

here and there, though in no considerable quantity. There were also

frequent niches of great magnitude, generally empty, but once in a

while containing some bizarre object carved from green soapstone which

was either broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant removal.

Other apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical

facilities--heating, lighting, and the like--of a sort suggested in

many of the carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes

been inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now.

Floors were also paved with such tiles, though plain stonework

predominated.

As I have said, all furniture and other movables were absent; but the

sculptures gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once

filled these tomblike, echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the

floors were generally thick with detritus, litter, and débris, but

farther down this condition decreased.

In some of the lower chambers and corridors there was little more than

gritty dust or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an

uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or

collapses had occurred, the lower levels were as littered as the

upper ones.

A central court--as we had seen in other structures, from the

air--saved the inner regions from total darkness; so that we seldom had

to use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying

sculptured details. Below the ice cap, however, the twilight deepened;

and in many parts of the tangled ground level there was an approach to

absolute blackness.

To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we

penetrated this æon-silent maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate

a hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and

impressions. The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the

place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added

to these elements were the recent unexplained horror at the camp, and

the revelations all too soon effected by the terrible mural sculptures

around us.

The moment we came upon a perfect section of carving, where no

ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it took only a brief study

to give us the hideous truth--a truth which it would be naïve to claim

Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had

carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could

now be no further merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which

had built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years

ago, when man's ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast

Dinosauria roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.

We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted--each

to himself--that the omnipresence of the five-pointed motif meant only

some cultural or religious exaltation of the archæan natural object

which had so patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the

decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of

Egypt the scarabæus, those of Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of

various savage tribes some chosen totem animal.

But this lone refuge was now stripped from us, and we were forced to

face definitely the reason-shaking realization which the reader of

these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to

write it down in black and white even now, but perhaps that will not be

necessary.

* * * * *

The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the

age of Dinosauria were not indeed Dinosauria, but far worse. Mere

Dinosauria were new and almost brainless objects--but the builders of

the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in rocks even

then laid down well nigh a thousand million years--rocks laid down

before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of

cells--rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at all.

They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt

the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the

Pnakotic Manuscripts and the _Necronomicon_ affrightedly hint about.

They were the great "Old Ones" that had filtered down from the stars

when earth was young--the beings whose substance an alien evolution had

shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had never bred. And

to think that only the day before Danforth and I had actually looked

upon fragments of their millennially fossilized substance--and that

poor Lake and his party had seen their complete outlines----

It is, of course, impossible for me to relate in proper order the

stages by which we picked up what we know of that monstrous chapter of

prehuman life. After the first shock of the certain revelation, we had

to pause a while to recuperate, and it was fully three o'clock before

we got started on our actual tour of systematic research.

The sculptures in the building we entered were of relatively late

date--perhaps two million years ago--as checked up by geological,

biological, and astronomical features--and embodied an art which would

be called decadent in comparison with that of specimens we found in

older buildings, after crossing bridges under the glacial sheet.

One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back forty or

possibly even fifty million years--to the lower Eocene or upper

Cretaceous--and contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing

anything else, with one tremendous exception, that we encountered. That

was, we have since agreed, the oldest domestic structure we traversed.

Were it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made

public, I would refrain from telling what I found and inferred, lest I

be confined as a madman. Of course, the infinitely early parts of the

patchwork tale--representing the preterrestrial life of the star-headed

beings on other planets, in other galaxies, and in other universes--can

readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings

themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so

uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics

that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge when they see the

photographs I shall publish.

Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a

fraction of any connected story, nor did we even begin to come upon the

various stages of that story in their proper order. Some of the vast

rooms were independent units so far as their designs were concerned,

whilst in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried through a

series of rooms and corridors.

The best of the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful

abyss below even the ancient ground level--a cavern perhaps two hundred

feet square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly been an

educational center of some sort.

There were many provoking repetitions of the same material in different

rooms and buildings, since certain chapters of experience, and certain

summaries or phases of racial history, had evidently been favorites

with different decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant

versions of the same theme proved useful in settling debatable points

and filling up gaps.

I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our

disposal. Of course, we even now have only the barest outline--and

much of that was obtained later on from a study of the photographs and

sketches we made.

It may be the effect of this later study--the revived memories and

vague impressions acting in conjunction with his general sensitiveness

and with that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence he will not

reveal even to me--which has been the immediate source of Danforth's

present breakdown.

But it had to be; for we could not issue our warning intelligently

without the fullest possible information, and the issuance of that

warning is a prime necessity. Certain lingering influences in that

unknown antarctic world of disordered time and alien natural law make

it imperative that further exploration be discouraged.