Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured
hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms
and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream fragments
involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion.
There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from those
buried epochs; for as we wound our panting way up the sixty-foot
cylinder of primal masonry we glimpsed beside us a continuous
procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race's early and undecayed
technique--a farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million years
ago.
Finally, scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound
of tumbled blocks, with the curved walls of higher stonework rising
westward, and the brooding peaks of the great mountains showing beyond
the more crumbled structures toward the east.
The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice vapors,
and the cold clutched at our vitals.
In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the
foothills--the probable ancient terrace--by which we had descended, and
could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on
the rising slope ahead.
Halfway uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing
spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic tangle of incredible
stone shapes below us--once more outlined mystically against an unknown
west. As we did so we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning
haziness; the restless ice vapors having moved up to the zenith, where
their mocking outlines seemed on the point of settling into some
bizarre pattern which they feared to make quite definite or conclusive.
* * * * *
There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind
the grotesque city a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose
needle-pointed heights loomed dreamlike against the beckoning rose
color of the western sky. Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the
ancient table-land, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing
it as an irregular ribbon of shadow.
For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic
beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this
far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of
the forbidden land--highest of earth's peaks and focus of earth's evil;
harborers of nameless horrors and Archæan secrets; shunned and prayed
to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living
thing of earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending
strange beams across the plains in the polar night.
If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told
truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than three
hundred miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin
essence jut above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of
a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens.
Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of
what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their
accursed sloping--and wondered how much sense and how much folly had
lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently.
I recalled how their northerly end must come near the coast at Queen
Mary Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition
was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away; and hoped that
no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what
might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed a
measure of my overwrought condition at the time--and Danforth seemed to
be even worse.
Yet before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our
plane our fears had become transferred to the lesser, but vast enough,
range whose re-crossing lay ahead of us.
From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly
and hideously against the east, again reminding us of those strange
Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the
damnable honeycombings inside them, and of the frightful amorphous
entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming sway even to
the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the
prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave mouths where
the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range.
To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around
several of the summits--as poor Lake must have done when he made that
early mistake about volcanism--and thought shiveringly of that kindred
mist from which we had just escaped--of that, and of the blasphemous,
horror-fostering abyss whence all such vapors came.
* * * * *
All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying
furs. Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a
very smooth take-off over the nightmare city.
At a very high level there must have been great disturbance, since the
ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things;
but at twenty-four thousand feet, the height we needed for the pass, we
found navigation quite practicable.
As we drew close to the jutting peaks the wind's strange piping again
became manifest, and I could see Danforth's hands trembling at the
controls. Rank amateur though I was, I thought at that moment that I
might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing
between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take
over his duties he did not protest.
I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared
at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the pass.
But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous
nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling
about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the
cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy,
rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely
clouded sky.
It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass,
that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster, by shattering
my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the
controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and
we made the crossing safely----Yet I am afraid that Danforth will never
be the same again.
I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him
scream out so insanely--a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly
responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted
conversation above the wind's piping and the engine's buzzing as we
reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the
camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made
as we prepared to leave the nightmare city.
* * * * *
All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a
mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes
and caves of those echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains
of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, demonic glimpse,
among the churning westward zenith clouds, of what lay back of those
other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and
feared.
He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things
about "the black pit," "the carven rim," "the proto-Shoggoths," "the
windowless solids with five dimensions," "the nameless cylinders," "the
elder pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color out
of space," "the wings," "the eyes in darkness," "the moon-ladder," "the
original, the eternal, the undying," and other bizarre conceptions;
but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it
to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed,
is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through
that worm-riddled copy of the _Necronomicon_ kept under lock and key in
the college library.
The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and
disturbed enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well
imagine that its swirls of ice dust may have taken strange forms.
Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be
reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud,
might easily have supplied the rest--and, of course, Danforth did not
hint any of these specific horrors till after his memory had had a
chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much
in one instantaneous glance.
At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single,
mad word of all too obvious source: "_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_"