III

None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning. It was because of the excitement of Lake’s discovery and the fury of the wind. McTighe was awake at ten o’clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed, but electrical condition prevented communication. We got, however, the Arkham, and Douglas told me that he had vainly tried to reach Lake. He had not known about the wind, there was no storm at McMurdo Sound.

Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at intervals, but without results. After three o’clock the wind was very quiet, and we redoubled our efforts to get Lake. Nevertheless the silence continued.

By six o’clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after a wireless consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I decided to take steps toward investigation. The fifth aeroplane, which we had left at the McMurdo Sound with Sherman and two sailors, was in good shape and ready for instant use. I got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to join me with the plane and the two sailors at the southern base as quickly as possible.

Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30, and reported a quiet flight from several points on the wing. They arrived at our base at midnight. It was risky business sailing over the Antarctic in a single aeroplane without any bases, but no one drew back. At 4 o’clock we were ready to finish the loading and packing.

At 7:15 a.m., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under McTighe’s pilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food supply, and other items including the plane’s wireless outfit. The atmosphere was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature.

The sailor Larsen was first to see the jagged line of witch-like cones and pinnacles ahead. The mountains rose grimly into the western sky. I felt that they were evil things – mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some ultimate abyss.

It was young Danforth noticed the curious regularities of the higher mountain skyline – regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed were like primordial temple ruins. How disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings. Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory of man – or of his predecessors – is long, and it may be that certain tales have come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and earlier than any human world we know. Leng, wherever in space or time it might exist, was not a region I would like to be in or near. At the moment I felt sorry that I had read the abhorred Necronomicon, or talked so much with that folklorist Wilmarth at the university.

We drew near the mountains and began to distinguish the cumulative undulations of the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks; but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism.

It looked like a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry. It embodied monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged; and strange beetling, table-like constructions, rectangular slabs, circular plates, five-pointed stars. There were composite cones and pyramids, surmounting cylinders or cubes or truncated cones and pyramids. The view was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism.

I was glad when the mirage began to disappear. As the whole illusion dissolved we began to look earthward again, and saw that our journey’s end was near. The unknown mountains ahead rose like a fearsome rampart of giants. We were over the lowest foothills now, and could see amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau a couple of darkish spots which we took to be Lake’s camp and boring. The higher foothills started between five and six miles away, forming a range. Ropes – the student who had changed McTighe – began to head downward toward the left-hand dark spot. As he did so, McTighe sent out the last wireless message from our expedition to the world.

Everyone, of course, has read our brief bulletins. Some hours after our landing we sent a report of the tragedy we found, and announced the end of the whole Lake party from the frightful wind of the preceding day, or of the night before that. Eleven dead, young Gedney missing. But we went beyond the truth. We dared not tell; and I would not tell the truth now but for the need of warning others.

It is a fact that the wind had been really terrible. One aeroplane shelter was nearly crashed; and the derrick was entirely shaken to pieces. Two of the small tents were flattened despite their snow banking. It is also true that we found none of the Archaean biological objects. We gathered some minerals from a vast, tumbled pile, including several greenish soapstone fragments, and some fossil bones.

None of the dogs survived, their snow house near the camp was wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that. All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to explain that the wind may have blown them off. The drill and ice-melting machinery at the boring were badly damaged. We brought back all the books, scientific equipment, and other things we could find.

At 4 p.m, after trying to find Gedney, we sent our message to the Arkham. About the fourteen biological specimens, we were indefinite. We said that they were damaged, but that was enough to prove Lake’s description wholly and accurate. It was hard work to hide our personal emotions – and we did not mention how we had found those things which we did find. We had agreed not to say about probable madness of Lake’s men: they carefully buried six imperfect monstrosities upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds. The eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake disappeared.

I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the next day that I had made with Danforth. It was the fact that only a lightened plane could possibly cross a range of such height. On our return at 1 a.m., Danforth was close to hysterics. I persuaded him not to show our sketches and the other things we brought away in our pockets, not to say anything more to the others than what we had agreed to say, and to hide our camera films for private development later on. So that part of my present story will be quite new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman, and the rest as it will be to the world in general. Indeed, Danforth is more silent than I: for he probably saw something he would not tell even me.

As all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent – a confirmation of Lake’s words. This is in every respect true, and it completely satisfied the men at the camp. We were absent for sixteen hours – a longer time than our flying, landing, and rock-collecting program demanded, but we said it had been due to wind conditions, and told truly of our landing on the farther foothills. Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough. While we were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson had worked like beavers over Lake’s two best planes.

We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old base as soon as possible. That was the safest way to work toward McMurdo Sound. Further exploration was hardly possible in view of our tragic events and the ruin of our drilling machinery. The doubts and horrors around us – which we did not reveal – made us wish only to escape from this austral world of madness.

As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without further disasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next day – January 27th – after a swift non-stop flight; and on the 28th we reached McMurdo Sound.

In five days more, the Arkham and Miskatonic entered the Ross Sea. Less than a fortnight later we left that polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we were alive.

Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage Antarctic exploration. Even young Danforth has not told anything to his doctors.

Lake’s reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused the highest naturalists’ and paleontologists’ interest, though we were sensible enough not to show the detached parts we had taken from the actual buried specimens, or our photographs of those specimens as they were found. We also did not show the scarred bones and greenish soapstones; while Danforth and I were alone we studied them in terror, and then brought them away in our pockets.

But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organizing. They can get to the innermost nucleus of the Antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which we know may end the world. So I must tell everything I know – even about that ultimate, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.

IV

I let my mind go back to Lake’s camp and what we really found there – and to that thing beyond the mountains of madness. I would like to miss the details, and to hide the actual facts. I hope I have said enough already. The main thing is the horror at the camp. I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the broken machinery, the constant barking of our dogs, the missing sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological specimens. I do not recall whether I mentioned that we found one dog missing. We did not think much about that till later – indeed, only Danforth and I have thought of it at all.

The principal things relate to the bodies. The condition of the bodies – men and dogs alike – was abnormal. They had all been torn and mangled. The dogs had evidently started the trouble. But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. I could imagine that missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found. I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some were incised in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was the same with dogs and men, as made by a careful butcher. This had occurred in one of the crude aeroplane shelters from which the plane had been dragged out. There were scattered bits of clothing, roughly slashed from the humans.

As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog were missing. When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs and two men. When we had entered the dissecting tent, we had something to reveal. The covered parts of the primal monstrosity had been removed from the improvised table. We had already realized that one of the six buried things that we had found – the one with the hateful odor – must represent the collected sections of the creature which Lake had tried to analyze. On that laboratory table were other things: oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. Lake’s anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidences of their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it we found matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men; and the dog parts with the other thirty-five dogs.

The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain instruments, illustrated technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches and batteries, food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents and fur suits was mystic. We did not know what to think. The maltreatment of the human and dog bodies, and the crazy burial of the damaged Archaean specimens, were all signs of apparent madness. We carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane disorder at the camp; and we will use the prints to prevent the proposed Starkweather-Moore Expedition.

Madness was the only explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody. Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an aeroplane cruise over all the surrounding territory in the afternoon, sweeping the horizon, trying to find Gedney and the various missing things; but nothing came to light. The party reported that the titan barrier range extended endlessly to right and left alike. On some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations were bolder and plainer. They also noticed cryptical cave mouths on the black snow-denuded summits.

We wondered about the unknown realm beyond those mysterious mountains. We rested at midnight after our day of terror and bafflement – but not without a tentative plan for range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with aerial camera and geologist’s outfit, beginning the following morning. Danforth and I awaked at 7 a.m. intending an early flight; however, heavy winds – mentioned in our brief bulletin to the outside world – delayed our start till nearly nine o’clock.

Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight and checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass in the range lay somewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about twenty-three thousand or twenty-four thousand feet above sea level. For this point, then, we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked on our flight of discovery. We were dressed, of course, in our heaviest furs.

As we drew near the forbidding peaks, we noticed more and more the curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a field glass and took aerial photographs while Danforth drove. We could easily see that much of the material of the things was a lightish Archaean quartzite.

The curious cave presented a puzzle because of their regularity of outline. They were, as Lake’s bulletin had said, often approximately square or semicircular; as if the symmetry was made by some magic hand. There were many of them, and they were apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites. Outside, parts of mountain slopes seemed smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the slight cracks present unusual patterns. These patterns vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities.

We had risen gradually. We saw that the terrain was not difficult, but the touch of evil mystery in these barrier mountains glimpsed between their summits. It is impossible to explain it in literal words. Even the wind’s sound held a strain of conscious malignity; there was a note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions.

We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of twenty-three thousand, five hundred and seventy feet; and had left the region of clinging snow below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers. Beyond it was the sky – the sky of that mysterious farther realm upon which no human eye had ever gazed. We stared over the secrets of an elder and utterly alien Earth.