Naturally, Danforth and I studied with special interest and a
peculiarly personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate
district in which we were. Of this local material there was naturally a
vast abundance.
On the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find
a house of very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a
neighboring rift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying
the story of the region, much beyond the Pliocene map, whence we
derived our last general glimpse of the prehuman world. This was the
last place we examined in detail, since what we found there set upon us
a fresh, immediate objective.
Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible
of all the corners of earth's globe. Of all existing lands it was
infinitely the most ancient. The conviction grew upon us that this
hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng
which even the mad author of the _Necronomicon_ was reluctant to
discuss.
The great mountain chain was tremendously long--starting as a low range
at Luitpold Land on the coast of Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the
entire continent. The really high part stretched in a mighty arc from
about Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70°, East Longitude
115°, with its concave side toward our camp and its seaward end in the
region of that long, ice-locked coast whose hills were glimpsed by
Wilkes and Mawson at the antarctic circle.
Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of nature seemed disturbingly
close at hand. I have said that these peaks are higher than the
Himalayas, but the sculptures forbid me to say that they are earth's
highest. That grim honor is beyond doubt reserved for something
which half the sculptures hesitated to record at all, whilst others
approached it with obvious repugnance and trepidation.
It seems that there was one part of the ancient land--the first part
that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon
and the Old Ones had seeped down from the stars--which had come to be
shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil. Cities built there had crumbled
before their time, and had been found suddenly deserted.
Then when the first great earth buckling had convulsed the region in
the Comanchean Age, a frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up
amidst the most appalling din and chaos--and earth had received her
loftiest and most terrible mountains.
If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must
have been much over forty thousand feet high--radically vaster than
even the shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended,
it appeared, from about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°,
E. Longitude 100°--less than three hundred miles away from the dead
city, so that we would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim
western distance had it not been for that vague, opalescent haze. Their
northern end must likewise be visible from the long antarctic circle
coast line at Queen Mary Land.
Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers
to those mountains--but none ever went near them or dared to guess
what lay beyond. No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the
emotions conveyed in the carvings I prayed that none ever might.
There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them--Queen Mary and
Kaiser Wilhelm Lands--and I thank Heaven no one has been able to land
and climb those hills. I am not as sceptical about old tales and fears
as I used to be, and I do not laugh now at the prehuman sculptor's
notion that lightning paused meaningfully now and then at each of the
brooding crests, and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those
terrible pinnacles all through the long polar night. There may be a
very real and very monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about
Kadath in the Cold Waste.
But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less
namelessly accursed. Soon after the founding of the city the great
mountain range became the seat of the principal temples, and many
carvings showed what grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky
where now we saw only the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts.
In the course of ages the caves had appeared, and had been shaped into
adjuncts of the temples. With the advance of still later epochs all
the limestone veins of the region were hollowed out by ground waters,
so that the mountains, the foothills, and the plains below them were
a veritable network of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic
sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and of the final
discovery of the Stygian sunless sea that lurked at earth's bowels.
* * * * *
This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river
which flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains,
and which had formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones' range and
flowed beside that chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten
Lands on Wilkes's coast line. Little by little it had eaten away the
limestone hill base at its turning, till at last its sapping currents
reached the caverns of the ground waters and joined with them in
digging a deeper abyss.
Finally its whole bulk emptied into the hollow hills and left the old
bed toward the ocean dry. Much of the later city as we now found it
had been built over that former bed. The Old Ones, understanding what
had happened, and exercising their always keen artistic sense, had
carved into ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where the
great stream began its descent into eternal darkness.
This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly
the one whose extinct course we had seen in our aëroplane survey.
Its position in different carvings of the city helped us to orient
ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stages of the region's
age-long, æon-dead history, so that we were able to sketch a hasty but
careful map of the salient features--squares, important buildings, and
the like--for guidance in further explorations.
We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was
a million or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures
told us exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and
suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had
looked like.
It must have had a marvelous and mystic beauty, and as I thought of
it I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which
the city's inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness and
glacial twilight had choked and weighed on my spirit.
Yet, according to certain carvings the denizens of that city had
themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a
somber and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shown in
the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object--never allowed to
appear in the design--found in the great river and indicated as having
been washed down through waving, vine-draped cycad forests from those
horrible westward mountains.
It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that
we obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the
city's desertion. Undoubtedly there must have been many sculptures of
the same age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and
aspirations of a stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain
evidence of the existence of others came to us shortly afterward. But
this was the first and only set we directly encountered.
We meant to look farther later on; but as I have said, immediate
conditions dictated another present objective. There would, though,
have been a limit--for after all hope of a long future occupancy of the
place had perished among the Old Ones, there could not but have been a
complete cessation of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course,
was the coming of the great cold which once held most of the earth in
thrall, and which has never departed from the ill-fated poles--the
great cold that, at the world's other extremity, put an end to the
fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.
Just when this tendency began in the antarctic it would be hard to say
in terms of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general
glacial periods at a distance of about five hundred thousand years from
the present, but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced
much earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork, but it
is quite likely that the decadent sculptures were made considerably
less than a million years ago, and that the actual desertion of
the city was complete long before the conventional opening of the
Pleistocene--five hundred thousand years ago--as reckoned in terms of
the earth's whole surface.
* * * * *
In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation
everywhere, and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old
Ones. Heating devices were shown in the houses, and winter travelers
were represented as muffled in protective fabrics. Then we saw a
series of cartouches--the continuous band arrangement being frequently
interrupted in these late carvings--depicting a constantly growing
migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmth--some fleeing to
cities under the sea off the far-away coast, and some clambering down
through networks of limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the
neighboring black abyss of subterrane waters.
In the end, it seems to have been the neighboring abyss which received
the greatest colonization. This was partly due, no doubt, to the
traditional sacredness of this special region, but may have been more
conclusively determined by the opportunities it gave for continuing
the use of the great temples on the honeycombed mountains, and for
retaining the vast land city as a place of summer residence and base of
communication with various mines.
The linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by means
of several gradings and improvements along the connecting routes,
including the chiseling of numerous direct tunnels from the ancient
metropolis to the black abyss--sharply down-pointing tunnels whose
mouths we carefully drew, according to our most thoughtful estimates,
on the guide map we were compiling.
It was obvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a
reasonable exploring distance of where we were--both being on the
mountainward edge of the city, one less than a quarter of a mile toward
the ancient rivercourse, and the other perhaps twice that distance in
the opposite direction.
The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places,
but the Old Ones built their new city under water--no doubt because of
its greater certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea
appears to have been very great, so that the earth's internal heat
could insure its habitability for an indefinite period.
The beings seem to have had no trouble in adapting themselves to
part-time--and eventually, of course, whole-time--residence under
water, since they had never allowed their gill systems to atrophy.
There were many sculptures which showed how they had always frequently
visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually
bathed on the deep bottom of their great river. The darkness of inner
earth could likewise have been no deterrent to a race accustomed to
long antarctic nights.
Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings
had a truly epic quality where they told of the building of
the new city in the cavern sea. The Old Ones had gone about it
scientifically--quarrying insoluble rocks from the heart of the
honeycombed mountains, and employing expert workers from the nearest
submarine city to perform the construction according to the best
methods.
These workers brought with them all that was necessary to establish
the new venture--Shoggoth tissue from which to breed stone lifters and
subsequent beasts of burden for the cavern city, and other protoplasmic
matter to mold into phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes.
* * * * *
At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea,
its architecture much like that of the city above, and its workmanship
displaying relatively little decadence because of the precise
mathematical element inherent in building operations.
The newly bred Shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular
intelligence, and were represented as taking and executing orders with
marvelous quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by
mimicking their voices--a sort of musical piping over a wide range,
if poor Lake's dissection had indicated aright--and to work more from
spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times.
They were, however, kept in admirable control. The phosphorescent
organisms supplied light with vast effectiveness, and doubtless atoned
for the loss of the familiar polar auroras of the outer-world night.
Art and decoration were pursued, though, of course, with a certain
decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realize this falling off themselves,
and in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by
transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their
land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped
Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital
greater splendors than its own people could create. That the transfer
of sculptured blocks had not been more extensive, was doubtless owing
to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned.
By the time total abandonment did occur--and it surely must have
occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced--the Old Ones
had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art--or had ceased
to recognize the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate,
the æon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale
sculptural denudation, though all the best separate statues, like other
movables, had been taken away.
The decadent cartouches and dados telling this story were, as I have
said, the latest we could find in our limited search. They left us with
a picture of the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land
city in summer and the sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading
with the sea-bottom cities off the antarctic coast.
By this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have been
recognized, for the sculptures showed many signs of the cold's malign
encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the
winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer.
The saurian live stock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were
standing it none too well. To keep on with the work of the upper
world it had become necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and
curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land life--a thing the Old Ones
had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless,
and the upper sea had lost most of its denizens except the seals and
whales. All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque
penguins.
What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new
sea-cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in
eternal blackness? Had the subterranean waters frozen at last? To what
fate had the ocean-bottom cities of the outer world been delivered?
Had any of the Old Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice cap?
Existing geology shows no trace of their presence. Had the frightful
Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land world of the north? Could
one be sure of what might or might not linger, even to this day, in the
lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth's deepest water?
Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of
pressure--and men of the sea have fished up curious objects at
times. And has the killer-whale theory really explained the savage
and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a generation ago by
Borchgrevingk?
The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for
their geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been
a very early date in the land city's history. They were, according to
their location, certainly not less than thirty million years old, and
we reflected that in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the
cavern itself, had had no existence.
They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary
vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around
them, and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty
mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean.
And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens--especially
about the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake's hideously
ravaged camp. There was something abnormal about that whole
business--the strange things we had tried so hard to lay to somebody's
madness--those frightful graves--the amount _and nature_ of the
missing material--Gedney--the unearthly toughness of those archaic
monstrosities, and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now showed
the race to have----Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last
few hours, and were prepared to believe and keep silent about many
appalling and incredible secrets of primal nature.