V

I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror, and disbelief in our own senses. The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for we saw some fiendish violation of natural law. Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation, there was a tangle of orderly stone. It could not be artificial. This Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality.

Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved the frightful things from destroying in the hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of years. “Corona Mundi… Roof of the World…” All sorts of fantastic phrases sprang to our lips as we looked down at the unbelievable spectacle. I thought again of the primal myths that were real in this dead Antarctic world – of the demoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or abominable Snow-Men of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their pre-human implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the spawn associated with that semi-entity.

The city stretched off for boundless miles in every direction; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low. Gradual foothills separated it from the actual mountain rim. The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and ramparts which formed its mountain outposts.

The stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from ten to one hundred and fifty feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone – blocks in many cases as large as 4×6×8 feet – though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed-rock of pre-Cambrian slate. The buildings were not equal in size, there were innumerable honeycomb arrangements. The general shape of these things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms. The builders had used the principle of the arch, and domes had probably existed there a long ago.

The whole city was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial debris. Where the ice was transparent we could see the lower parts of the gigantic piles, and we noticed the stone bridges which connected the different towers at varying distances above the ground. On the exposed walls we could detect countless large windows; some of which were closed. Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless. With the field glass we could see sculptural decorations in horizontal bands – decorations including those curious groups of dots which presented on the ancient soapstones. In many places the buildings were totally ruined.

I can only wonder that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium. Of course, we knew that something – chronology, scientific theory, or our own consciousness – was awry; yet we kept on guiding the plane, observing many things quite minutely, and taking a careful series of photographs. What sort of beings had built and lived in this gigantic place? What relation to the general world could they have?

This place could not be an ordinary city. It was the primary nucleus and center of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth’s history. Here was a Palaeogaean megalopolis compared with which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoë in the land of Lomar, are recent things of today – not even of yesterday; this megalopolis was ranking with such pre-human blasphemies as Valusia, R’lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City of Arabia Deserta. As we flew above those titan towers my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds and wandered aimlessly in realms of fantastic associations. And there appeared links between this lost world and some of my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp.

The plane’s fuel tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had been only partly filled. There seemed to be no limit to the mountain range, or to the length of the frightful stone city. Fifty miles of flight in each direction showed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry. Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city had borders, even though its length along the foothills seemed endless. After about thirty miles the grotesque stone buildings began to disappear.

We had made no landing, but to leave the plateau without an attempt at entering some of the monstrous structures would be inconceivable. So we decided to find a smooth place on the foothills and to do some exploration on foot. We succeeded at about 12:30 p.m. and found a landing on a smooth, hard snow-field wholly devoid of obstacles.

It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking. For our foot journey we discarded the heaviest of our flying furs, and took with us a small pocket compass, a hand camera, light provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper, a geologist’s hammer and a chisel, specimen-bags, a coil of climbing rope, and powerful electric torches with extra batteries. This equipment could help us take ground pictures, make drawings and topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens from some bare slope, or mountain cave. Fortunately we had some extra paper for marking our course in any interior mazes.

We were walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stone labyrinth. We had become visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks and we wanted to see it with our own eyes. Both Danforth and I were very well, and felt equal to almost any task to fulfill. We came to a roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline.

This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps three hundred feet from point to point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6×8 feet in surface. There was a row of arched windows about four feet wide and five feet high, spaced quite symmetrically along the points of the star and at its inner angles.

We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher the nearly effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated floor. We wished that Pabodie were present, for his engineering knowledge might have helped us a lot.

The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city was something of which the smallest details will always remain engraved on my mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any human conceive such optical effects. Between us and the churning vapors of the west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers. It was a mirage in solid stone, and were it not for the photographs, I would still doubt that such a thing existed. The extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban manifestations were beyond all description.

There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid would scarcely find a name – cones of irregularity and truncation, terraces of provocative disproportion, shafts with odd enlargements, broken columns in curious groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness.

Our field-glasses showed the external, horizontal bands of effaced sculptures, and we could imagine what the city once looked like – even though most of the roofs and tower tops had perished. It loomed like a dream fantasy.

When at last we entered the town itself, clambering over fallen masonry, our sensations again became out of control. Danforth insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like; sometimes he stopped to listen to a subtle, imaginary sound – a musical piping, he said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves.

Nevertheless, our scientific and adventurous souls were ready to research. No doubt, we were wandering amidst a dead town which was dead for five hundred thousand years, or even longer.

We came across a row of windows – in a colossal five-edged cone – which led into a vast, well-preserved room with a stone floor. We had a rope with us, but did not wish to go down. This enormous room was probably a hall, and our electric torches showed bold, distinct, and startling sculptures arranged round the walls, separated by equally broad strips of conventional arabesques.

Finally, we found an archway about six feet wide and ten feet high. Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast building easy. Observing the many inner archways, and realizing the probable complexity of the apartments within, we decided that we must begin our system of marking the way. Our compasses had been enough to prevent our losing our way; but the artificial substitute would be necessary.

It was impossible to guess how extensive this territory was. Almost all the areas of transparent ice revealed submerged windows, as if the town had been left in that uniform state until the ice came to crystallize the lower part of it.