VIII

Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest everything about the district in which we were. This was the place we examined in detail.

Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of Earth’s globe. And it was the most ancient. This hideous upland was 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, virtually crossing the entire continent.

I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas. It seems that there was one part of the ancient land which had come as vaguely and namelessly evil. Earth had received her loftiest and most terrible mountains.

If the scale of the carvings was correct, these things were much over forty thousand feet high – higher than even the shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended from about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 100° – less than three hundred miles away from the dead city. 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. There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them – Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm Lands – and I am very glad that no one has been able to land and climb those hills.

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. In the course of ages the caves had appeared.

The vast gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which flowed down from the horrible westward mountains. We could soon reconstruct the whole 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 had looked like. It had a marvelous and mystic beauty, but according to certain carvings, the denizens of that city had known some terror.

It would be hard to say in terms of exact years when the cold appeared. 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 long before the Pleistocene.

The Old Ones built their new city under water. There were many sculptures which showed how they had always frequently visited their submarine relatives, and how they had habitually bathed on the deep bottom of their great river.

A mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of the sea. The new Shoggoths grew to enormous size and intelligence. The Old Ones transplanted fine blocks of ancient carving from their land city.

What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new sea city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal blackness? Had the subterranean waters frozen at last?

IX

From the carvings we understood that a descending walk of about a mile through tunnels would bring us to the dizzy, sunless cliffs above the great abyss. To watch this fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure. So at last we went eagerly in the direction of the nearest tunnel.

According to the carvings, the desired tunnel was not more than a quarter of a mile from where we stood. We threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and compass – traversing rooms and corridors, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and clambering down again, hastening along immaculate stretches.

I come now to a place where the temptation to hide the truth is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the rest in order to discourage further exploration. Shortly before 8:30 p.m., Danforth’s keen young nostrils felt something unusual. If we had had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned before. There was an odor – and that odor was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had troubled us upon opening the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected.

Of course the answer was not as clear as it sounds now. Most important of all, we did not want to retreat without further investigation. Anyway, what we suspected was too wild to believe. Such things did not happen in any normal world.

Danforth’s eyes as well as nose noticed the queer aspect of the debris. It did not look untouched after countless thousands of years. We saw parallel tracks of the dragging of heavy objects. We stopped.

We caught the other odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was less frightful and more frightful odor – for it was the odor of petrol – every-day gasoline.

Danforth whispered again of the print he had seen in the ruins above; and of the faint musical piping.

The torch showed several doorways; and from one of them the gasoline odor came stronger. In another moment, Danforth’s sharp vision had found a place where the floor debris had been disturbed. What we saw in that light was actually simple and trifling. Let me be plain. The scattered objects were all from Lake’s camp: tin cans, many matches, three illustrated books, an empty ink bottle, a broken fountain pen, some fragments of fur and tent-cloth, a used electric battery, piles of paper.

Our conclusions were now completely fixed. Perhaps we were mad – I said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness, didn’t I? We were half-paralyzed with terror.

Of course we did not mean to face ugly creatures – which we knew had been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now.

Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall what ideas we had. We certainly did not want to face what we feared – but unconsciously we wished to watch certain things from some hidden point.

About 9:30 p.m., while traversing a long, vaulted corridor, we began to see strong daylight ahead and were able to turn off our torch. We were coming to the vast circular place. The corridor ended in an arch surprisingly low for these megalithic ruins, but we could see much through it. Beyond it stretched a prodigious round space – fully two hundred feet in diameter. But the most remarkable object of the place was the titanic stone ramp. Without doubt, it was fifty million years old, and the most ancient structure ever.

It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by which the creatures had descended. There were the three sledges missing from Lake’s camp. They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and contained familiar things: the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provision tins, tarpaulins with books – everything taken from Lake’s equipment.

After what we had found in that other room, we were prepared to see more. The really great shock came when we stepped over and opened one tarpaulin. There were two bodies, both stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive plaster around the neck, and wrapped with care to prevent further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog.

X

We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing in mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our consciousness – the first sounds we had heard since descending. They were well known and mundane sounds. To be brief – it was simply the squawking of a penguin.

The presence of a living water-bird in such a direction was rather strange. The sound was repeated, and seemed at times to come from more than one throat. Seeking its source, we entered an archway from which much debris had been cleared.

The course was indicated by the penguin cries. Suddenly a white shape appeared ahead of us. This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we realized at once that it was a giant penguin. It was only a penguin – larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, huge and blind. More of them stood silently behind. They were large and dark.

When we had followed them into the archway, we saw that they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones’ sculptures.

We wondered, what had caused these birds to go out of their usual domain.

We went further. The corridor ended in a prodigious open space. It was the entrance to the great abyss.

Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was – at least at the start – about fifteen feet each way; sides, floor, and arched roof composed of the usual megalithic masonry. The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of conventional designs in a late, decadent style; and all the construction and carving were marvelously well-preserved. The farther we advanced, the warmer it became. Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in our diagrams. We saw several penguins as we passed along.

After about a quarter of a mile the scent became greatly accentuated. We saw and heard fewer penguins. The new and inexplicable odor appeared, it was abominably strong. Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead – obstructions which were not penguins – and turned on our second torch.

XI

I have come to another place where it is very difficult to proceed. Four specimens lay on the floor. We had not approached them, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel – run back, before we had seen what we saw.

Both of our torches were turned on the objects. They were without heads. From each one the tentacled starfish-head had been removed. Great God! What madness made that?

It was not fear of those four creatures – we suspected they would do no harm again. Poor devils! They were the men of another age and another order of being. Poor Lake, poor Gedney… and poor Old Ones! They had crossed the icy peaks. They had found their dead city. They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness – and what had they found?

The shock of recognizing that monstrous headlessness had frozen us into mute, motionless statues. It seemed ages that we stood there, but actually it was no more than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled forward – and then came a sound which upset much of what we had just decided. We ran back to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open circle.

The new sound, as I have intimated, frightened us a lot. It was, Danforth later told me, precisely what he had caught when we entered the alley corner above the glacial level. It certainly sounded like the wind-pipings we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves. We all remember Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym written a century ago. In that fantastic tale there is a terrible word connected with the Antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic snowy birds. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” That, I may admit, is exactly what we heard.

We were running very fast, though we knew that the Old Ones are much faster. We had a vague hope, however, that non-aggressive conduct might save us. Would we see, at last, a complete and living specimen of those others? Again came that musical piping – “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Thank Heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened, and was driving ahead with increased speed. Once more came that sinister piping – “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” Our torch now revealed ahead of us the large open cavern, and we were glad to leave the morbid sculptures behind. We had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city.

The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing took a wrong gallery. The penguins alone could not saved us, but with the mist they seem to have done so.

We glanced back. As we did so we flashed both torches at the momentarily thinned mist. And again came that shocking piping – “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

I will to be frank in stating what we saw. No words can ever reflect the awfulness of the sight itself. We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible entity if the mists were thin enough. What we saw was something different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; and its nearest analogue is a vast, rushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform.

But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic column oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry – “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” and at last we remembered that the demoniac Shoggoths – given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns by the Old Ones – had no voice.