The full story, so far as deciphered, will eventually appear in an
official bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only
the salient highlights in a formless, rambling way. Myth or otherwise,
the sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the
nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space--their coming, and the
coming of many other alien entities such as at certain times embark
upon spatial pioneering.
They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast
membranous wings--thus oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long
ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. They had lived under the sea a
good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with
nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown
principles of energy.
Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed
man's to-day, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate
forms only when obliged to.
Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage
of mechanized life on other planets, but had receded upon finding
its effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness
of organization and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly
able to live on a high plane without the more specialized fruits
of artificial manufacture, and even without garments, except for
occasional protection against the elements.
It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes,
that they first created earth life--using available substances
according to long-known methods.
The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various
cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets, having
manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular
protoplasmic masses capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of
temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal
slaves to perform the heavy work of the community.
These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered
about as the "Shoggoths" in his frightful _Necronomicon_, though even
that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the
dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.
When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized their
simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed
other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable
life for sundry purposes, extirpating any whose presence became
troublesome.
With the aid of the Shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift
prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast
and imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on
land. Indeed, the highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land in
other parts of the universe, and probably retained many traditions of
land construction.
As we studied the architecture of all these sculptured Palæogæan
cities, including that whose æon-dead corridors we were even then
traversing, we were impressed by a curious coincidence which we have
not yet tried to explain, even to ourselves. The tops of the buildings,
which in the actual city around us had, of course, been weathered into
shapeless ruins ages ago, were clearly displayed in the bas-reliefs,
and showed vast clusters of needlelike spires, delicate finials
on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin, horizontal
scalloped disks capping cylindrical shafts.
This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous
mirage, cast by a dead city whence such sky-line features had been
absent for thousands and ten of thousands of years, which loomed on our
ignorant eyes across the unfathomed mountains of madness as we first
approached poor Lake's ill-fated camp.
* * * * *
Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them
migrated to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had
continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main
head tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing
in quite the usual way--the writing accomplished with a stylus on
waterproof waxen surfaces.
Those lower down in the ocean depths, though they used a curious
phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their vision with
obscure special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their
heads--senses which rendered all the Old Ones partly independent of
light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and writing had changed
curiously during the descent, embodying certain apparently chemical
coating processes--probably to secure phosphorescence--which the
bas-reliefs could not make clear to us.
The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming--using the lateral
crinoid arms--and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles
containing the pseudofeet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops
with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fan-like folding
wings.
On land they locally used the pseudofeet, but now and then flew to
great heights or over long distances with their wings. The many
slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely
delicate, flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous
coördination--ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic
and other manual operations.
The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific
pressure of the deepest sea bottoms appeared powerless to harm them.
Very few seemed to die at all except by violence, and their burial
places were very limited. The facts that they covered their vertically
inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in
Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and recuperation necessary
after the sculptures revealed it.
[Illustration: _The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even
terrific pressures were powerless to harm them!_]
The beings multiplied by means of spores--like vegetable pteridophyta,
as Lake had suspected--but, owing to their prodigious toughness and
longevity, and consequent lack of replacement needs, they did not
encourage the large-scale development of new prothallia except when
they had new regions to colonize.
The young matured swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond
any standard we can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and æsthetic
life was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set of
customs and institutions which I shall describe more fully in my coming
monograph. These varied slightly according to sea or land residence,
but had the same foundations and essentials.
Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic
substances; they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food.
They ate uncooked marine life under the sea, but cooked their viands on
land. They hunted game and raised meat herds--slaughtering with sharp
weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had
noted.
They resisted all ordinary temperatures marvelously, and in their
natural state could live in water down to freezing. When the great
chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however--nearly a million years
ago--the land dwellers had to resort to special measures, including
artificial heating--until, at last, the deadly cold appears to have
driven them back into the sea.
For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legend said, they
had absorbed certain chemicals and become almost independent of eating,
breathing, or heat conditions--but by the time of the great cold
they had lost track of the method. In any case, they could not have
prolonged the artificial state indefinitely without harm.
Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had
no biological basis for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed
to organize large households on the principles of comfortable
space-utility and--as we deduced from the pictured occupations and
diversions of codwellers--congenial mental association.
In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the center of the
huge rooms, leaving all wall spaces free for decorative treatment.
Lighting, in the case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a
device probably electro-chemical in nature.
Both on land and under water they used curious tables, chairs and
couches like cylindrical frames--for they rested and slept upright with
folded-down tentacles--and racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces
forming their books.
* * * * *
Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no
certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we
saw. There was extensive commerce, both local and between different
cities--certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed,
serving as money. Probably the smaller of the various greenish
soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such currency.
Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock
raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also
practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent migration seemed
relatively rare except for the vast colonizing movements by which the
race expanded.
For personal locomotion no external aid was used, since in land, air,
and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively
vast capacities for speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of
burden--Shoggoths under the sea, and a curious variety of primitive
vertebrates in the later years of land existence.
These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms--animal
and vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aërial--were the products of
unguided evolution acting on life cells made by the Old Ones, but
escaping beyond their radius of attention. They had been suffered
to develop unchecked because they had not come in conflict with the
dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically
exterminated.
It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent
sculptures a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and
sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely
simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of
land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally
lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to
palæontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic
changes and convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of
miraculous. Though few or none of their first cities seem to have
remained beyond the Archæan Age, there was no interruption in their
civilization or in the transmission of their records.
Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean,
and it is likely that they came not long after the matter forming the
moon was wrenched from the neighboring South Pacific. According to one
of the sculptured maps, the whole globe was then under water, with
stone cities scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as æons
passed.
Another map shows a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole, where
it is evident that some of the beings made experimental settlements,
though their main centers were transferred to the nearest sea bottom.
Later maps, which display this land mass as cracking and drifting, and
sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the
theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and
Joly.
With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific, tremendous events
began. Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that
was not the worst misfortune. Another race--a land race of beings
shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous prehuman
spawn of Cthulhu--soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and
precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones
wholly back to the sea--a colossal blow in view of the increasing land
settlements.
Later, peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu
spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands. New land
cities were founded--the greatest of them in the antarctic, for this
region of first arrival was sacred.
From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the center of the Old
Ones' civilization, and all the cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn
were blotted out.
Then, suddenly, the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them
the frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that
the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet, except for one shadowy
fear about which they did not like to speak.
At a rather later age their cities dotted all the land and water areas
of the globe--hence the recommendation in my coming monograph that some
archæologist make systematic borings with Pabodie's type of apparatus
in certain widely separated regions.
* * * * *
The steady trend down the ages was from water to land--a movement
encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never
wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new
difficulty in breeding and managing the Shoggoths upon which successful
sea life depended.
With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of
creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost, so that the Old
Ones had to depend on the molding of forms already in existence. On
land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the Shoggoths of
the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of
accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem.
They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestion of
the Old Ones, and had modeled their tough plasticity into various
useful temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modeling powers
were sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative
forms implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a
semistable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition
echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it.
Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with
horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed
of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and
each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had,
however, a constantly shifting shape and volume--throwing out temporary
developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech
in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to
suggestion.
They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of
the Permian Age, perhaps one hundred and fifty million years ago, when
a veritable war of resubjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old
Ones. Pictures of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion
in which the Shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a
marvelously fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold
ages.
The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbance against
the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory.
Thereafter the sculptures showed a period in which Shoggoths were tamed
and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west
were tamed by cowboys.
Though during the rebellion the Shoggoths had shown an ability to
live out of water, this transition was not encouraged--since their
usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble
of their management.
During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the
form of a new invasion from outer space--this time by half-fungous,
half-crustacean creatures--creatures undoubtedly the same as those
figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered
in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men.
To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, for the first time
since their terrene advent, to sally forth again into the planetary
ether; but, despite all traditional preparations, found it no longer
possible to leave the earth's atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of
interstellar travel had been, it was now definitely lost to the race.
In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands,
though they were powerless to disturb those in the sea. Little by
little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original antarctic
habitat was beginning.
* * * * *
It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu
spawn and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely
different from that which we know than was the substance of the Old
Ones. They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations
impossible for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally
come from even remoter gulfs of cosmic space.
The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital
properties, were strictly material, and must have had their absolute
origin within the known space-time continuum--whereas the first
sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath.
All this, of course, assuming that the nonterrestrial linkages and
the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are not pure mythology.
Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework
to account for their occasional defeats, since historical interest
and pride obviously formed their chief psychological element. It is
significant that their annals failed to mention many advanced and
potent races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering ethics figure
persistently in certain obscure legends.
The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared
with startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In
certain cases existing science will require revision, while in other
cases its bold deductions are magnificently confirmed.
As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all
the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which
cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically
viscous lower surface--an hypothesis suggested by such things as the
complimentary outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the
great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up--receives striking
support from this uncanny source.
Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous of a hundred million or
more years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later
to separate Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe (then
the Valusia of primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic
continent.
Other charts--and most significantly one in connection with the
founding fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around
us--showed all the present continents well differentiated. And in
the latest discoverable specimen--dating perhaps from the Pliocene
Age--the approximate world of to-day appeared quite clearly despite the
linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe through
Greenland, and of South America with the antarctic continent through
Graham Land.
In the Carboniferous map the whole globe--ocean floor and rifted land
mass alike--bore symbols of the Old Ones' vast stone cities, but in the
later charts the gradual recession toward the antarctic became very
plain.
The final Pliocene specimen showed no land cities except on the
antarctic continent and the tip of South America, nor any ocean
cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge
and interest in the northern world, save for a study of coast lines
probably made during long exploration flights on those fan-like
membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones.
Destruction of cities through the up-thrust of mountains, the
centrifugal rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or
sea bottom, and other natural causes was a matter of common record; and
it was curious to observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as
the ages wore on.
The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last
general center of the race--built early in the Cretaceous Age after a
titanic earth buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not
far distant.
It appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of
all, where reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea
bottom. In the new city--many of whose features we could recognize
in the sculptures, but which stretched fully a hundred miles along
the mountain range in each direction beyond the farthest limits of
our aërial survey--there were reputed to be preserved certain sacred
stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city, which were thrust up
to light after long epochs in the course of the general crumpling of
strata.