At the Mountains of MadnessAge-adapted version

I never meant to tell this story. I am a scientist, and I like quiet facts, steady work, and careful questions more than grand speeches. But people are planning a new expedition into the deep south, and if I keep silent, they might fly and drill and melt their way into places no one should enter.

Then the worst of what we found could wake again. So I will speak, even if some of it sounds like wild fancies. I will trust that a few clear minds will weigh what I tell, look at the notes and the photographs we dared to take, and use their influence to warn others back from those mountains of madness.

I led the Miskatonic University Expedition as a geologist. Our team had one main goal: to collect deep rock and soil samples from many parts of Antarctica. We had a special tool for this, a light, portable drill designed by Professor Pabodie. His drill joined the idea of an Artesian well drill with a small circular rock drill, so we could chew quickly through changing layers of ice and stone.

The steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor, and collapsible wooden derrick, plus sectional pipes for five-inch bores down to a thousand feet, all broke down into loads three seven-dog sledges could carry. We also had four big Dornier aeroplanes, tuned to handle the thin air far up on the polar plateau. Pabodie added heaters to warm the fuel and tricks for quick starts in bitter cold. With the planes we could hop from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to many inland points.

We wanted to range over as much ground as one Antarctic season would allow, with most of our work on the high plateau and the mountain ranges south of the Ross Sea. Others—Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, Byrd—had crossed parts of this frozen world, but our plan was to land, drill, collect, and move again and again, building a wide map

of deep time from the rocks, especially the ancient layers older than the Cambrian. That narrow slice of the earth's oldest crust had given up only a few scraps before. We also hoped to gather a great variety of upper fossil rocks to better understand the life story of this realm of ice and silence. We were twenty in all. From Miskatonic came Pabodie the engineer; Lake, a biologist; Atwood, a physicist; and myself, a geologist and the leader on paper. Seven graduate students and nine mechanics rounded out the team. The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation gave most of the money, with some extra gifts from donors who liked big ideas and brave plans. We sailed from Boston on September second, 1930, took the Panama Canal, and re-stocked in Samoa and Hobart. The farther south we went, the lower the sun slid along the northern horizon. Near the Antarctic Circle, we met fields of pack ice and bright mirages that turned far-off bergs into towers and battlements, as if the sea itself had raised black castles into the sky. On November seventh we passed Franklin Island, and the next day we could see the twin cones of Erebus and Terror on Ross Island. Erebus puffed smoke now and then. Danforth, a sharp young graduate assistant with a head full of strange reading, pointed at the dark streaks on the snow and said the flow had inspired a line he loved from Poe about lavas rolling down Yaanek in the ultimate climes of the pole. On the shore below, penguins gathered in crowds, flapping and shouting like unruly children, and fat seals bobbed in the water. We landed on Ross Island just after midnight on the ninth. Our beach camp below the slope of Erebus was temporary. We hauled out our drills, sledges, tents, gasoline drums, an ice-melting rig, cameras, three small portable wireless sets, and the parts for our planes. We hoped to finish all our work in a single austral summer. The

first weeks went well. We climbed Erebus and bored for minerals at several points. We moved our second camp up onto the big barrier, where we assembled the planes. Fifty-five Alaskan dogs pulled our loads with joyful energy. We planned that the barrier camp would be our cache and workshop while the planes flew the real work into the deep.

On November twenty-first, four of the planes lifted at once and soared inland for four hours across smooth white shelves, with black peaks marching along our western side. The air thinned and the cold bit like a saw. Between latitudes eighty-three and eighty-four south, the land rose ahead in a broad white swell. There we knew we had reached the lip of the Beardmore Glacier, the world's greatest valley glacier.

We settled a southern base above it in latitude 86 degrees 7 minutes, east longitude 174 degrees 23 minutes, a place few feet had ever touched. We set to boring and blasting at once, with success that surprised even us. In the sandstones we found fern and seaweed prints; trilobites like stone bugs; crinoids, which look like sea lilies; and shells—a few linguellae and gastropods.

In one deep-blasted hole we brought up three fragments of old slate that Lake pieced together. Their surface bore a triangular pattern of fine ridges, a foot across at its widest. To me it looked like odd ripples flattened into stone long ago by pressure. Lake stared at it as if a stranger had opened a door in his childhood home.

We reached the Pole by air on January sixth, 1931. That triumph did not bring new maps, but the flight taught us to read the polar mirages—palaces built from light above an icebound desert. It was now midsummer, with long, endless daylight and winds that could turn savage without warning. Atwood's snow-block windbreaks saved our planes more than once.

We started planning a long push eastward. But Lake wanted one more look to the west. He kept

turning over the triangular marking in his mind, and he had a glint in his eye that told me he had already made up his mind. He said the pattern did not fit its age, and he could not let it go.

The slate was older than old—Cambrian or even earlier, perhaps five hundred million to a thousand million years back—and yet the mark, he said, hinted at something much more complex than a slime film, as if a well-built creature had brushed the mud and left its stamp. It would upend our timelines.

He wanted to take a small party northwest before we moved the whole base east. I did not like it, but I did not stop it.

Lake went on January twenty-second with one of the planes, others following, a few men, and a light drill. They promised to report by wireless at each step. We could hear the smile in his voice when he spoke from the sky.

Two hours out, he said he would land and try a small bore where the ice looked thin. Six hours later he sent a hurried, excited message.

They had found more slate pieces with triangular ridges like the first. Three hours after that, a brief bulletin: they had taken off again into a cutting gale. He sounded like a boy running downhill too fast to stop.

I worried, but I also felt the pull of his excitement. Then, an hour and a half later, came the message that made us crowd around the receiver and hold our breath: mountains ahead, higher than any seen before, black and bare of snow, going on and on to the right and left, with hints of two smoking cones.

The gale blew off them as if the peaks themselves exhaled. The sky line showed regular blocks like cubes clinging to the ridges.

Lake promised to send measures soon. Half an hour later he called again.

One of the planes—Moulton's—had been forced down on a plateau

in the foothills, but everyone was safe and the craft might be repaired. The mountains were beyond anything known, perhaps over thirty-five thousand feet if one counted the height of the plateau they rose from. Close up, the ridges looked layered, not volcanic. The strange square edges and cubical effects were everywhere. The sun dropped low and painted everything red-gold. Lake begged us to come as soon as we could. The land called to him like a whisper of a forbidden gate. Lake decided to keep camp where Moulton's plane had landed. The ice there was thin with patches of dark ground showing through. He wanted to sink borings there first. He loved the silence and the mighty spires like the wall at the world's rim, but he also feared the winds that scoured those stone faces. He told us to hurry and make this region our first and our last stop. Next morning we planned by wireless to send one of Lake's planes back to bring Pabodie, me, and five others, plus as much fuel as it could carry. The old southern base would stay as a supply village of reinforced tents. But the weather changed its mind. After four in the afternoon, Lake's messages turned stranger and more excited. He had flown to scout the nearest rocks and found no trace of the Archaean layers he wanted on the open ground. He saw Jurassic and Comanchean sandstones, Permian and Triassic schists, and some black coal on the surface, but not the ancient slate vein yet. He set up the drill on the softest sandstone a quarter mile from camp and got to work. Three hours later, after the first heavy blast, the crew shouted. Gedney, a bright student who was acting foreman, ran into camp with his eyes wide. They had struck a cave. Beneath the sandstone lay Comanchean limestone rich with fossil sea creatures—cephalopods, corals, sea urchins, and spirifera. There were also bits of siliceous sponges and the bones

of fishes and sharks. They had not seen vertebrates in our borings before. Then the drill head dropped into empty space. A blast opened a jagged hole five feet across. Inside lay a long, shallow hollow in the limestone, seven or eight feet deep and stretching out past the light.

Stalactites hung like stone icicles from the roof; stalagmites rose like stony candles from the floor. Some had joined to make thick columns. And most curious of all, a current of fresh, moving air sighed up out of the darkness, hinting at a whole world of caves.

But that was not what took hold of Lake's mind like a storm. In the rubble, Fowler found more triangular striated prints, not only in the sandstone above but in the limestone below—identical to the mark from the Archaean slate so many millions of years older. The idea felt like a hand on Lake's shoulder. Was there a kind of life that had left this stamp from the dawn of time clear through to the Comanchean age, changing only a little, living on while continents shifted and seas rose and fell? It sounded impossible, like a tall tale, and yet the marks lay there in his hands.

There were other clues in the cave too, and none of them kind. The bones of great saurians and rough old mammals showed strange damages—clean holes bored straight in, or chopping cuts unlike any tooth marks they knew. A few bones were neatly severed. Lake sent for the electric torches. He wanted to go deeper.

An hour later, the team found a fragment of greenish soapstone, six inches across, shaped like a five-pointed star. Its points were broken. It was like no local rock at all: smooth, regular, unpleasantly so.

On its little flat, unbroken area was a round depression. Under the magnifier, Carroll thought he saw tiny dots in neat batches, as if they made a pattern. The dogs growled and balked at this stone, their hackles high.

They had never done that for any fossil or device before. Then, at a quarter past ten that night, came the report that cracked the shell of everything we thought we knew. Orrendorf and Watkins, far in the cave with their torches, had found a barrel-shaped fossil of unknown kind. It was about six feet long, swelling in the middle to three and a half feet, and tapering to about a foot at each end. The torso had five broad ridges like the staves of a barrel, with deep furrows between them. In each furrow lay a folded, fanlike wing made of a membrane laced with fine tubes, like a pattern of veins. One wing, unbroken, spanned almost seven feet. At the equator of the body, at the top of each ridge where it met this belt, stood a set of flexible arms or tentacles—five such stalks, each branching into five thinner stalks, and each of those into five more long, tapering tendrils, twenty-five to a stalk. The arrangement made a kind of five-fold symmetry repeated in details. One of the men, whose reading habits ran to dark corners of old libraries, said it reminded him of fabled Elder Things. The dogs could not stand it. They would have ripped it apart if the men had not held them back. By eleven-thirty, Lake sent his most urgent message yet. Farther in, in a cluster together with bits of the same greenish star stones, his team had found thirteen more of the barrel forms. Eight looked whole, with every wing and tendril in place. The other five were crushed or damaged. They were very tough and springy, not brittle like most fossils. The team, with nine men and three sledges, dragged all fourteen back to camp while the dogs howled and pulled. Lake set up a lab tent with a gasoline stove to thaw one of the perfect ones for careful study. But the tissues, soft to the touch, were far too tough for

ordinary tools without destroying fine details. So he chose a badly crushed one instead, whose starry ends were still partly intact but whose torso had torn open along a great furrow. What he saw baffled all of us. Mineral replacement was almost absent. Despite perhaps forty million years of time, the insides had not turned to stone. They had preserved like leather, dark and strong. At first the flesh was dry. As warmth crept in, a pungent, bitter moisture sweated out—not blood, but a thick, dark green fluid that seemed to carry oxygen and food like blood does. As the scent crept through the camp, the dogs in their half-built snow corral went wild, the sound of their fury turning the back of my neck to ice. Lake sent a steady stream of notes. Outside the starfish-shaped head at the top and a similar greenish star arrangement at the bottom—whose arms ended in paddles that matched prints in rocks from a billion to fifty million years old—the whole thing looked animal. The star head had five points, each with a round, glassy eye with a red iris. Along each point lay a flexible yellowish tube folded in tight. From the inner angle of each point grew a reddish tube that ended in a small bell mouth lined with sharp, white toothlike nubs—probably five mouths or food pipes. Yet inside, other clues looked like plants: spore cases at the wing tips, and traces of development from a kind of thallus. It breathed oxygen through gills and pores, and seemed built to hibernate in airless places for long periods. Vocal organs hinted it could make long, piping notes over a wide range. Its muscles were extraordinary, and its nerve centers—arranged in ganglia and a five-lobed brain—looked very advanced. There were also wiry cilia on the head that seemed to serve senses beyond ours. Lake became half amused, half uneasy when he thought of old myths about Great Old Ones dropping from the stars and tinkering

with life for sport. He joked that these were the Elder Ones and spent an hour writing careful descriptions that would turn textbooks on their heads. By two-thirty in the morning, exhausted but burning with ideas, he stopped, covered the dissected one with a tarpaulin, and drew the eight perfect specimens together beneath a spare tent to shield them from the low sun and to keep their scent from the dogs. He set heavy snow blocks on the tent corners. The wind up there near the mighty peaks had a way of rising from quiet to roaring in a breath. They banked snow against tents and shelters on the mountainward side. He planned to sleep a little and talk to us at ten. We slept poorly. The wind around our camp howled like an organ. I could not help thinking about the odd musical piping notes the air sometimes made when it flowed past sharp cave mouths. Danforth, our keenest flyer, looked pale but awake at ten. He tried to call Lake. The air itself seemed to crackle with some kind of charge, and we could not get through. We reached the ship, the Arkham, and Captain Douglas said he too could not raise Lake. After noon the wind went mad. Ice grains cut at us like grit from a sandblaster. The gale slackened at two and fell quiet after three. We tried again and again. Silence. Lake had four planes with good short-wave sets. No single accident could silence them all. Fear grew like a weight in our chests. By six, we acted. I told Sherman to bring the spare plane from McMurdo Sound to our southern base. At midnight he landed with two sailors and fuel. We loaded at once. It was risky to fly that far into the Antarctic in a single aircraft with no chain of bases, but no one stepped back. We slept for a few hours and then took off at seven-fifteen in the morning of

January twenty-fifth, ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, fuel, food, and tools for rough repairs. I remember every minute of that four-and-a-half-hour flight.

First the white plain, then the broken skin where Lake had sunk his mid-journey shaft. Then strange little cylinders of fluffy snow tumbling in the wind, like someone had rolled them by hand and left them to drift. Then, far ahead, a jagged line like the teeth of a broken saw rising higher than any mountain range should. As we neared the peaks, a mirage unfurled above us, a dark city of vast towers and walls and bridges floating in the opalescent sky, all wrong in angle and shape, alive with an old malice.

Danforth gripped my arm and whispered that he wished he had never read certain books. The mirage broke and curled away into vapor. We looked down and saw two dark patches, Lake's camp and the boring site. We circled and landed by the camp.

Then we saw the truth. The gale had shredded shelters, polished metal smooth with ice-blown grit, sucked the paint from wood, and flattened two small tents. One plane shelter was smashed to splinters.

The derrick at the boring was in pieces. But not all the changes spoke of wind. Someone had tugged at parts of the grounded planes and the scientific gear, moved them, loosened them, left them set together in ways that made no sense, unless the wind had learned to be curious.

The dogs were dead, and their snow fence was broken outwards as if something had driven them to panic from within. All tracks lay scoured away. We found some of the green soapstone fragments with the five rounded points and faint patterns of grouped dots. We found fossil bones with those odd bored holes and chopping cuts. We did not find any of the Archaean biological objects whole.

We also found something worse—something we did not tell the world. We left it out of our radio message and

wrote around it later in our official report. Under the drifting snow we dug up six of the barrel-shaped things, damaged ones Lake had not dissected. They had been carefully buried upright in six graves nine feet deep, with five-pointed mounds above them. Across each mound someone had punched groups of dots into the snow in the same patterns we saw on the green stones.

The eight perfect ones from the cave were gone without a trace. The air smelled cold and metallic, like the silence after a scream.

We filled in Lake's blasted cave entrance with the wreckage of the drill and ice-melting rig. We left two of the most battered planes. We sent a guarded message to the Arkham saying that the whole party had been wiped out by the storm.

We named the eleven dead. Gedney was missing. We said the bodies were too damaged to carry. It was not a lie. But it was not the truth that mattered most.

We should have left then. Instead, Danforth and I, because we had the lightest plane and because we could not bear the thought of not knowing, took off next day for the pass.

Only a plane stripped of all but the barest load could reach those heights. We said we were scouting the weather and the land. At twenty-three thousand five hundred and seventy feet we slid into the notch between two dark stone towers.

Strange cubical blocks and low ramparts clung to the walls. Echoing cave mouths dotted the slopes like a row of black eyes. A few feet more, and the world opened.

Beyond lay a wide, wind-scoured plateau, twenty thousand feet high. On it, under a thin glaze of ice and snow, stretched a city that had no end we could see. Great walls and towers of slate, schist, and sandstone rose in an endless tangle, most from ten to one hundred and fifty feet tall, with perfect cubes, perfect cylinders, fluted truncated cones, clusters of

five-pointed plans and angled buildings whose patterns made my skin prickle. Fallen blocks and stones lay everywhere. Where the ice was clear, we could see stone bridges connecting towers high in the air. Many windows gaped like sockets, some still shut with petrified wood shutters. Carvings ran in bands across the walls, rich with figures and with those same groups of dots. A wide swath free of buildings ran from the city's heart to a break in the foothills—not a street, but the old course of a great river that had once poured through and then vanished into a deep cleft under the mountains. It was like looking at an impossibly old mirage made solid. We took photographs and measurements and circled for miles. The spectacle told us one thing clear as cold: this was not natural. Those forms had been made by some hand, not by frost or volcano or the tired slow squeeze of the earth. The builders had raised a megalopolis older than any human dream. We landed on a smooth snow field near the foothills and checked the plane. The wind was gentle and the air thin. We shouldered light packs—compass, hand camera, notebooks, a geologist's hammer, rope, food, and torches with spare batteries—and walked down to the labyrinth. The first ruin we touched was a star-shaped rampart, three hundred feet from point to point, its arched windows four feet wide and five high, cut into Jurassic sandstone blocks six by eight feet in surface, laid without mortar. The inner walls still showed faint carved bands. In touching those blocks I felt I had placed my hand on an age the human mind is not made to grasp. We crawled through a window and photographed what we could. Our field glasses showed that many buildings in the main city were less choked with ice than this one. Perhaps, we thought, some halls still held open passages down to the true ground level. We descended into the alleys, squeezed between

walls that had stood longer than mammals had ruled the earth, and began our trail system. We tore a notebook into strips and dropped a marker at each turn, knowing that without them we would be lost in minutes.

The rooms we found were incredible in their variety—triangles, five-pointed stars, perfect cubes, most about thirty feet square and twenty feet high, some much larger. We climbed and climbed across cracked bridges and up and down ribbed stone ramps. Everything felt unhuman in scale and proportion, not in size only, but in some deeper way hard to name.

On the lower levels, beneath the ice sheet, the dark grew thick and we needed the torches to read the walls. There the carvings came clear. They were great bands, three feet high, that ran around the rooms, one pictorial band followed by a band of pure pattern, and then pictorial again.

The designs were delicate and precise, but their style did not belong to any art humans have made. The patterns seemed to obey a strange mathematics based on the number five. The pictorial bands were cut in low relief, with backgrounds sunk about two inches. In places we could see traces of ancient pigments. Between the bands were cartouches with dot groups, too regular to be natural, clearly words in some forgotten script.

In some rooms the carvings grew into charts and maps and diagrams so detailed that we could follow the story they told room by room, even if we could not read the dots. What they showed was a history of a race older than anything we had dreamed about. The star-headed beings of Lake's discovery had built this place.

They had come to Earth from space when the planet was young, winging through the ether on their great membranes. They liked the sea best and built their first cities under the waves, fighting wars with other beings we could not fully understand. They could create life from simple substances, and

they did. For food and later for labor, they shaped little and big creatures in the sea. Their great work was a slave-beast they called shoggoth in the old whispers: a viscous, shape-shifting mass that could make any temporary organs needed, grow huge, follow orders given by hypnotic thought, move boulders, carve channels, and live almost anywhere.

With the shoggoths, they raised undersea towns into vast labyrinths of stone, like the city we walked now, and later they built on land too. They moved through the water with their lower tendrils and their lateral arms, and on land with the starry paddles at their bases. They could fly to great heights with their wings if the air suited. They were incredibly tough. Few died except by violence.

When one of them passed, the others buried it upright and raised a five-pointed mound above the grave with signs marked in dots. They multiplied by spores like ferns. The young grew quickly and learned with an intensity beyond what we imagine.

They wore little, sometimes fabric for warmth, and used machines when needed but did not depend on them. They seemed to have tired of too much machinery on other worlds in older times.

At first they lived mostly in the sea. But as ages rolled and new lands rose, they spread onto the land with help from tamed reptiles and beasts. Their shoggoths on the sea floor began to change, splitting as they grew smarter and sometimes pushing beyond the hypnotic chains that held them. A war of resubjugation in the Permian age raged in the deep. The carvings of it were fearsome even in stone: beams of strange force, the boiling of the waters, and wild battles in caverns.

Later came new enemies. A race of land creatures shaped like octopi, clearly the kind linked to whispers of R'lyeh and Cthulhu, slid down from the stars and fought the Old Ones. Peace came for a time, and the new lands in the Pacific

went to the octopi while the Old Ones kept the old lands and the seas. Then, with some earth shift, the Pacific lands sank again, taking R'lyeh and all the cosmic octopi down, and the Old Ones were again supreme—except for one shadow they never named without fear. Much later, another race, half fungus and half crustacean—the Mi-Go of certain northern tales—invaded from space and drove the Old Ones out of the northern continents. After that, the Old Ones slowly fell back to their first, sacred home: Antarctica.

The maps carved on the walls, colored once and now bare stone, showed continents in older positions that matched the best modern ideas of continental drift. The artists marked great rifts that would later split Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic fragments apart. They showed how, fifty million years ago, the builders founded the vast dead city where we stood. They showed how a great river once flowed from the westward mountains, turned at the foot of the range, and went to the Indian Ocean—until it gnawed away the limestone and fell into a network of caverns, making a black, sunless sea under the hills.

The later bands grew sad. The world cooled. Here in the far south, winter bit harder and longer. Fewer plants grew. Animals died or fled.

The Old Ones lit fires in their houses. They wrapped themselves in fabrics. The summers no longer melted the snows. The land city, sacred and old, could not be held year-round.

Some of them moved to cities under the sea near the coast. Others, led by tradition and by practical needs, went down through limestone caves to the black abyss where the great underground sea washed the roots of the mountains. There, on the sea floor warmed by the earth's heat and lit by bioluminescent creatures they bred, they raised a new metropolis with the same angles and forms as the one above, but with art and joy diminished.

They drilled direct tunnels

from the old land city to the abyss, so they could still use the great mountain temples above and keep the land city as a summer outpost and for mining. They even bred some shoggoths for cold land work, though they had avoided that before.

The last bands hinted and then told us outright of a fear that lay beyond the mountains we had crossed. In the far west rose a line of abhorred peaks, higher even than the tallest we knew—over forty thousand feet by the scale carved—and the Old Ones carved them little or not at all, as if it hurt to name them. Cities built near those heights had crumbled earlier than others.

The carvers showed lightning pausing at their sharp crests and a strange glow pulsing from one terrible pinnacle during the polar night. They carved their people recoiling from objects washed down the old river from those awful slopes. They prayed sometimes in their weakest days toward those peaks, but they never went near them.

We stared at those images and at our own photographs of a dim violet serrated line far off on the western horizon that we had barely noticed during our flight. We agreed without words that we would not go that way.

By the time we had traced the main story, it was eight in the evening. We had spent five hours of our battery power below the ice. We had perhaps four left if we were careful with one torch and saved the other. We wanted to stay for days to copy and map, but the hunger to see the abyss, the very heart of the story, burned hotter than caution.

The dot-cartouches told us two tunnel mouths lay within reach, one in the basement of a vast five-pointed structure not far away. If that one was blocked, a second less than a mile north might be open. We tore another notebook to shreds, took a deep breath, and set off. We did

not get far before the air changed. Danforth sniffed and halted. There was a scent, faint at first, not quite like anything else, but with a memory attached to it that made our stomachs lurch.

It reminded us of the smell in Lake's tent when he cut into the thing from the cave. We dimmed the torch and crept on, not looking at the sinister carvings anymore. The floor showed a swath where debris had been pushed aside recently. In a smoother stretch we thought we saw parallel marks, as if runners had slid there.

Then we smelled gasoline, sharp and ordinary. It came from a doorway where someone had recently cleared rubble. We stood, and in that pause the decision was made for us. We slipped into the black arch and raised the light.

It was a cube of a room, twenty feet on a side, strewn with dust and stone chips like all the others. But the dust had been scraped smooth in the middle. On that flat patch lay small things—tin cans with neat, odd openings, a shattered fountain pen, a used battery, scraps of fur and tent cloth clipped into odd patterns, a heater folder, three little books with pictures whose pages looked thumbed and smudged by hands that did not know paper, an empty ink bottle, and wads of crumpled paper. The gasoline odor was strong at one corner where a can had spilled.

We spread some of the papers. We saw rough maps of the city and a traced path from a big circular sign—perhaps a great cylindrical tower we had seen from the air—to a five-point building and a mark for a tunnel mouth. A crazed survivor could have made the dots in imitation of the stones and scratched the routes in a clumsy way. But the lines on the best sheets were not clumsy.

They were cut and flowing and sure, in the old style of the Elder Ones themselves. We were fools not

to run then. Maybe the madness of the peaks had already taken hold of us. But awe and curiosity burned too brightly. We followed the sketched path toward the great cylinder. We kept dropping paper, hugging the lower passages. We found the open round base of the tower easily. It was a huge circle, two hundred feet across, with a titanic stone ramp spiraling up the inner wall like the inside of a Babylonian ziggurat. The carvings here were older and more perfect than any we had seen. In the far angle, neatly sheltered by a fold of the ramp, stood three sledges, carefully strapped, with fuel cans, a gasoline stove, instrument cases, and tarpaulins bulging with books and other things. They were the three missing sledges from Lake's camp. We stared, then knelt and opened one tarpaulin. Inside, wrapped as gently as a child's toy, were two bodies: the missing dog and poor Gedney, both stiff and preserved, the wounds around the necks patched with sticky plaster to keep them in one piece. I will not say more about how he looked. Before we could speak, a sound came from deeper in the maze, a coarse, familiar squawking. It was a penguin. The cry floated from the direction our maps said the second tunnel lay. We moved again, dropping more paper, and saw white shapes ahead in the dim. They were penguins, huge—six feet tall—and colorless as if grown in a world without sun. Their eyes were blind. They waddled away into a side arch. As we went down a long, low, undecorated corridor, the floor sloped and the air grew warmer. The corridor ended in a perfect hollow dome a hundred feet across, with many low archways. One big black arch gaped fifteen feet high and wide. Carvings on its jambs had a stiff, late style. From it a breath of warmer air blew, moist and faintly misty. The blind penguins clustered in the bowl like lost souls. We entered the

tunnel to the abyss. It kept its size and smooth sweep for a while. Then the carved blocks at its sides gave way to living rock, though the shape stayed regular. The going stayed easy, and the warmth rose until we unbuttoned our furs. From time to time another gallery opened on the side, and near one of these lay a mess of fur and tent cloths cut into ugly patterns from Lake's camp. A little farther on, we found a broader chamber where the floor had been polished to an uncanny smoothness. The carvings along the walls here had been cut twice; Danforth noticed that the deep grooves of the new designs—a crude tangle of spirals and sharp angles—had been driven over older, finer work to erase it. A horrid new odor drowned out the already sickening one we had followed here. Then we saw the obstructions on the floor ahead, low but too big to be fallen stones, and we raised the second torch. Four forms lay there, headless, their star-shaped tops torn away with a violence beyond any knife or saw. Their dark green fluid had spread and dried. Black slime, fresh and glistening here and there, dotted their bodies and the nearby wall. Danforth made a sound like a thread snapping. We did not need the carvings to tell us the rest. The shoggoths had been here. Those formless, plastic, sliding slaves had come up from the abyss where the defeated ones had fled. They had cut down these Elder Ones and left their mark. We felt something I had not expected. Pity. The Elder Ones were not gods. They were people of another age, scientists to the last, who had climbed those mountains again to find their old city and read their history one last time. They had tried to reach living kin in the depths. What they found was their old mistake waiting for them. We stood still for ten long seconds. Then came a sound from

farther ahead, muffled in the warm mist, that shredded what control we had left. It was a piping, faint at first, like a tune played by wind through a rocky throat. Lake had joked that these beings might have vocal organs for musical notes. Now that piping pushed us into flight.

Perhaps it was one of the Elder Ones, wounded, trying to reach us. Perhaps it was something else. We did not stay to find out.

We ran, and the penguins screamed. The tunnel opened into the big domed place where many paths met. We had one wild thought: if we dimmed the torch and kept it pointed forward, the terrified cries of the penguins might confuse any pursuer and hide which path we chose. We risked it and lurched straight ahead toward the dead city, praying we remembered our turns. It saved us by a hair.

As we reached the cave, the mist behind us thinned for a heartbeat. Both of us—foolishly, humanly—looked back. We had half expected to see one of the Elder Ones. What we saw was worse.

The blackness ahead rolled and swelled, and within it a bulk slid forward like a living subway train, a wave-front of black iridescence studded with forming and collapsing eyes, each a pustule of green light. A spiral of pale vapor curled before it, and it made the cry we would never forget—Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li—like the mocking echo of the voice of its old masters. It smashed through the scrambling penguins as if they were drift. We ran without thinking. We found our marks. We wove through rooms and up corridors with no memory later of how we placed our feet. The sixty-foot spiral ramp of the great cylinder rose before us.

We climbed, panting, as the walls flowed past in a procession of perfect, ancient carvings, a farewell from a people carved for us fifty million years ago. We stumbled into daylight like sailors crawling onto a beach. Ahead lay the dark slopes

of the foothills and the little dot of our plane. Behind us, against a reddening sky, the black city brooded. Far beyond it, along the western rim of the world, the dim violet ragged line of the forbidden range pricked up like the teeth of a saw. We half thought we could see the shadow-track of the old river along the ancient table-land, slanting toward those peaks.

The cold sliced our lungs. Danforth started the engine. The wind's voice among the cave mouths along the ridge made a music that raised the hair on my arms.

We needed height for the pass, twenty-four thousand feet, and the air grew wild as we rose between the black pylons. Danforth, relieved of the controls for the first time in hours, turned and stared out at the city and back at the peaks and up at the boiling sky. His nerves were stretched to breaking, and I should have told him to look at his knees and breathe. When the wind steadied, his cry shattered the little calm I had. I barely kept the plane from tilting into the rock.

We crossed the pass by inches. Danforth's voice came and went, saying words that made no sense, chanting the stations of the Boston subway like a prayer. He will not tell me, even now, what exactly he saw in that last upward glance toward the zenith.

There was a gap in the clouds. In it he says he glimpsed, not anything to do with the cubes and caves of the mountains we crossed, but a shape or a hint of the land behind those far violet peaks. When he is not himself, he mutters about a black pit, a carven rim, proto-shoggoths, windowless solids, nameless cylinders, the elder pharos, Yog-Sothoth, the primal white jelly, a color out of space, wings and eyes and a moon-ladder, and the original, eternal, undying. When he is himself again, he denies all of it and blames old reading and

a brain overtaxed by fear. All I know is the sky was full of disturbed ice dust, and in such clouds, light plays tricks beyond even a trained mind's comfort. But it was enough to break him into a wordless terror, and the only word he could shape was the one the shoggoth had cried: Tekeli-li.

We came back to camp at last. The others had repaired two of Lake's planes. In the morning we loaded everything and left.

We reached our old base on the barrier on January twenty-seventh, and the sound on the twenty-eighth. Within five days the Arkham and the Miskatonic were free of the pack ice and steaming north, with the black mountains of Victoria Land behind us twisting the wind's wails into that wide-ranged piping that churned my blood.

Since our return, we have done what we can to cool the fever of others who would go south. Danforth bears his terror in silence. I have tried to keep back the worst of what we found, to prevent anyone from planning a return.

But silence is no longer wise. A new party, the Starkweather-Moore Expedition, is gathering a force and a readiness far beyond ours. If they fly into the heart of that continent with their drills and their fuses and their brave, eager hearts, they will reach a place that could end the world we know. So I have told you what we truly found at Lake's camp: not just wind damage, but buried beings arranged in graves with signs that match the soapstone dots; not just panic, but tampering with machines as if someone had taken them apart to see what made them go; not just missing men and dogs and sledges, but the careful removal of the eight perfect specimens.

And I have told you what lay beyond the mountains: a city older than memory, not human, where a race from the stars carved its whole story into bands of stone; a city deliberately closed

before the great cold, as if its people had planned their leaving; a city linked by tunnels to a black, warm underworld where albino penguins still walk and where something vast and formless slid along polished floors; and, at the last, a chase through those tunnels, a backward glance that stripped my world of comfort, and a single terrible word echoing from walls and nightmares alike.

I am not a superstitious man. I do not expect old gods to wake and stride across sunlit seas. But under the ice lies a record of a time when life did not wear any face we know. In the caverns fans a breath that does not know who we are. And on the far side of the world, beyond those violet peaks, the Old Ones themselves would not look.

That is enough for me. If curiosity drones and whines, let it go quiet now. If courage beats and urges a new we-can-do-it, let it turn back once. The soapstone stars were not toys.

The five-pointed mounds were not snow forts. The dot groups were not doodles. They were markers, and maybe warnings.

Leave the mountains of madness to their own winds. Leave the city of bands and dots to its old cold and its stubborn silence. Let the penguins have their long, blind march. Let the black sea breathe its steam into the endless dark.

Do not be the ones to find again that spiral ramp with sledges tucked under it and tarpaulins that hold more than you can carry. Do not stand under those carved bands with your mouth open and your torch guttering and think that because you can read a little of the story, you know the end. We walked there once, and we came back, but even now I hear that mocking cry in the corners of sleep and in the surf on cold nights.

I have said all I can. If you must have last neat facts, here they are. The

cave Lake opened was five feet across and breathed with moving air, proof of a vast system underneath. The fossils in its walls came from Comanchean limestone and told of marine life in layers of time.

The triangular striated prints appeared in stone from over six hundred million years ago and again in stones tens of millions of years younger, as if one line of life had lived and left its mark longer than seemed possible. The barrel-shaped organisms were about eight feet long from tip to tip, with five ridges, five wings between, and five systems of arms at their equator, each arm dividing into five stalks and again into five tendrils—twenty-five to a stalk. They were incredibly tough. Their tissues did not crumble under a scalpel; their dark green fluid served them as blood, and their bodies blended plant and animal features in a way that broke our categories. They had eyes, mouths, gills, pores, vocal organs, and senses beyond ours, and a five-lobed brain with ganglia that show a level of design no one can dismiss as simple.

Lake's dogs hated them. The greenish soapstones were shaped like stars with five points and ringed with tiny dot groups in patterns, not random.

The graves at Lake's camp were dug deep, the imperfect ones erected upright under five-pointed mounds with dot marks punched in snow. The eight perfect ones were carried away. The camp's gear was pried and moved in ways no wind would do.

And when we followed the signs under the city, we met blind penguins that had lost their eyes to ages of darkness and still kept their ancestor's giant size. We found carvings over carvings, the newer ones rough, the older erased as if some rude new hand wanted to stamp out an old story and write a cruder one. We saw headless Elder Ones and fresh black slime—the shoggoth's sign.

We fled as something came after us, sliding and piping in a voice not its own.

On our way out, when we looked back a second we did not have, we saw a living wave of shadow and eyes, like an onrushing black locomotive in a tunnel. We escaped, and that alone is a grace I doubt we deserved.

You may say this is fear talking. You may say the air at twenty-four thousand feet plays tricks. You may say the dots on the soapstones are weather pits and the cubes on the mountain slopes are broken ledges. Fine. Stay with what lets you sleep. But do not go. Leave the drilling rigs in their sheds. Give the dogs a safe yard to run. Let the planes rust.

The sun at the pole is very low, and the wind there has an edge like a blade and a tune that is not for human ears. The mountains beyond the Ross Sea are wrong in some old way, and mankind is young. We should not hurry to be old.

When I think back to the first week—those bright, normal days when the sky was blue, the penguins shouted, and Erebus smoked like a tired giant—I can still feel the pride and joy of flying over the white world with friends who trusted me and with plans that seemed as sensible as any well-made map. Then we drilled and blasted and broke a thin shell, and through that crack came a breath from before our kind had eyes.

I am not ashamed to say that what I want most now is for no one else to make the same mistake. Let the earth keep some of its secrets.

There is wonder enough in the snow and the light on ice and the tracks of a penguin line crossing a plain. You do not need to hear, as I have, the wind take a cave mouth for a flute and play an old lost word. You do not need to learn how that word feels when it slips into your dreams. Tekeli-li.