VI

Our photographs of those carvings will prove my words, and it is pity that we did not have much film with us. But we made crude notebook sketches of certain features.

We had entered the building of great size and elaborateness. It gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the lower levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity characterized the entire arrangement. We decided to explore the more ancient parts first. The rooms we encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. Their general average was about 30×30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height, though many larger apartments existed.

After thoroughly examining the upper regions and the glacial level, we descended, story by story, into the submerged part, where indeed we saw a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages. The Cyclopean massiveness and gigantism of everything around us became curiously oppressive; and there was something unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon realized, from the carvings, that this monstrous city was many million years old.

We did not see any furniture in the rooms. The prime decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture. The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved to the highest degree of civilized mastery. The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical principles, symmetrical curves and angles were based on the quantity of five. It is useless to try to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque conceptions of the futurists.

The arabesque tracery consisted of depressed lines. The more we studied the marvelous technique, the more we admired it. The carvings were very informative to us, and we placed their photography and transcription above all other considerations.

High windows and massive twelve-foot doorways were interrupting these sculptured walls. All metal fixtures had vanished, but some of the doors remained in place, so we progressed from room to room.

As I have said, all furniture and other things were absent; but the sculptures gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these tomb-like rooms. There could be no further doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man’s ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.

The creatures once dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objects – but the builders of the city were wise and old. They had built the town before the true life of Earth advanced. They were the makers and enslavers of that life. They are the originals of the fiendish elder myths. The Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon tell about them something. They were the great “Old Ones” that had come down from the stars when earth was young. Only one day before Danforth and I had actually looked upon fragments of their fossilized substance. I would like to refrain from telling what I found and inferred. Let others judge when they see the photographs I shall publish.

VII

The full report will appear in an official bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I shall give only some sketches. The sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the lifeless Earth out of cosmic space – their coming, and the coming of many other alien entities. They could traverse the interstellar – thus confirming some curious folklore told to me by a colleague. They had lived under the sea, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles using intricate devices employing unknown principles of energy. Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed ours. Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanized life on other planets.

Under the sea they created Earth-life. They had done the same thing on other planets. They created 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. 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.

With the aid of the Shoggoths, who could lift prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing labyrinths of stone. The Old Ones had lived much on land in other parts of the universe, and probably retained many traditions of land construction.

Volumes could be written of the life of the Old Ones. Those in water had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing on waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths enforced their vision with obscure special senses. The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming and partly by wriggling. Occasionally they could fly, too. On land they locally used the pseudofeet, but flew to great heights or over long distances with their wings.

Their toughness was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressure of the deepest sea-bottoms could not harm them. Very few died, and their burial places were very limited. They covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds. They multiplied by means of spores – like vegetable pteridophytes, as Lake had suspected. The young beings received an education evidently beyond any standard we can imagine.

They were able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances, but they preferred organic and especially animal food. Under the sea they ate uncooked food, but on land they cooked their viands. They hunted using sharp weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resisted all ordinary temperatures, and could live in water down to freezing. For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legends said, they absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating, breathing, or heat conditions – but by the time of the great cold they had lost their methods.

The Old Ones were semi-vegetable in structure, and they had no biological basis for the family phase of mammal life. In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the center of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for decoration. Lighting was done by a device probably electro-chemical in nature. Both on land and underwater they used curious tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical frames – they slept upright with folded-down tentacles. They had sets of dotted surfaces forming their books.

Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic. There was extensive commerce, both local and between different cities – certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture existed. They traveled much, but permanent migration was relatively rare. Under the sea, they used Shoggoths to draw loads, and on land, they used primitive vertebrates.

These vertebrates were the products of unguided evolution. In the building of land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls.

The Old Ones survived various geologic changes and convulsions of the Earth’s crust. 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 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.

With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began. Some of the marine cities were destroyed, yet that was not the worst misfortune. Another race – a land race of creatures shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu – soon came down from cosmic infinity and began a monstrous war. Later peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn while 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 was sacred. The Antarctic remained the center of the Old Ones’ civilization, and all the cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn were destroyed. 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. But there was something they did not like to speak about.

They began to move from water to land, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. There was the difficulty in breeding and managing the Shoggoths upon which successful sea life depended. As the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost. The Shoggoths acquired a dangerous degree of intelligence, and that was a real problem.

The Shoggoths developed a semi-stable brain. Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like a compilation of bubbles, and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They were able to form apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech.

So the Old Ones began to kill the Shoggoths. Pictures of this war were terrible. 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.

During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones had a new invasion from outer space – this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures – creatures remembered in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or abominable Snow-Men. The Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands.

It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go were different from the Old Ones. The Old Ones were strictly material, and had their absolute origin within the known space-time continuum – whereas the first sources of the other beings are absolutely unknown. The vast dead megalopolis around us was the last center of the race.