The Mountains Of Madness
Part 2

The young Danforth who draws our attention to the strange regularity of the higher mountain skyline — such regularity attaches the pieces of the perfect cube, which Lake mentions in his messages, and that does justify its comparison with the dream-like advice of an ancient temple - the ruins on the cloudy mountaintop of Asia are so fine and strangely painted by Roerich. There is indeed something Roerich-like haunting about this entire continent of untapped mountain mysteries.  I felt it in October when we first saw Victoria Land, and I feel it only now. I also felt a wave of restless awareness that resembled an Archaean myth; about how disturbing this deadly realm was related to the notorious Leng plateau in primal writings. Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory of humans — or its predecessors — long, and it is possible that certain tales have descended from the ground and mountains and horror temples earlier than Asia and earlier than any human world we know. Some bold mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Punakotic script, and have suggested that Tsathoggua worshipers are as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua himself. Leng, anywhere in space or time that might be brooding, was not the territory I wanted to live in or near; nor do I enjoy the closeness of a world that once produced such ambiguous and ancient monstrosities as Lake just mentioned. At the time I felt sorry that I had read the hated Necronomicon, or talked so much with the learned and distasteful folklore writer of Wilmarth at university.

This mood certainly exacerbated my reaction to the strange mirage that appeared on us from the hotter zenith as we approached the mountains and began to see the cumulative undulation of the foothills. I've seen dozens of polar mirages over the previous weeks, some of which are quite as bizarre and unusually clear as the sample is now; he said; but this one has an entirely new and obscure quality of symbolism, and I trembled as the boiling labyrinth of walls and towers and incredible towers rose out of the troubled icy vapors upon our heads.

The effect is that the Cyclopean city has no architecture known to man or human imagination, with an enormous collection of black-night bricks that embody a terrible departure from the laws of geometry and reach the most bizarre extremes of the creepy wonder. There are truncated cones, sometimes stratified or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there enlarged and often covered with tiers of thin toothed discs; and strange, beetles, and, table-like constructions show multifaceted piles of rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping one underneath. There are composite cones and pyramids either alone or passing through cylinders or cubes or flat cut cones and pyramids, and sometimes like needle towers in groups of five odd. All of these febrile structures appear to be united by tubular bridges passing from one to another at dizzying heights, and the scale implied from the whole is frightening and oppressive in its immense might. A common type of mirage is like some wild form observed and drawn by the Arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820; but at this time and place, with the dark and unknown mountain peaks soaring high ahead, that strange old-world discoveries are in our minds, and the magnitude of the possibility of disaster enveloping most of our expeditions, we all seem to find in it a stain of latent ferocity and a harbinger of infinite evil.

I was delighted when the mirage began to break, although in the process various towers and nightmare cones were assumed to be a temporary form of greed that was even more severe. When the whole illusion dissolves in the spinning opalescence, we begin to look at the earth again, and see that the end of our journey is not far away. The unknown mountains ahead rose up and hovered like terrifying gigantic fortresses, astonishing regularity sticking out with shocking clarity even without the field glass. We are at the top of the lowest foothills now, and can see amidst the snow, ice, and bare fields of their plateau, he said, some dark places that we consider Lake camp and boring. The higher foothills soared between five and six miles away, forming an almost different range of monstrous lines more than the Himalayan peaks beyond them. Finally, Ropes — students who had lightened McTighe at the control of — started heading down to the dark spot to the left whose size marked it as a camp. When he did, McTighe sent the last uncensored wireless message the world received from our expedition.

It is a fact that the wind has wreaked terrible havoc. Whether all can live through it, even without anything else, is very open to doubt. The storm, with the fury of crazy driven ice particles, must have surpassed anything our previous expeditions had encountered. One aircraft shelter — all, it seems, have been left in too weak and inadequate conditions — almost destroyed; and the crane in the distant bore was completely shaken. The exposed metal from the grounded plane and the drilling machine bruised into high paint, and two small tents were flattened despite the snow. The wooden surface left behind in the explosion was pitted and shaved with paint, and all trace marks in the snow were completely obliterated. It is also true that we did not find a single Archaean biological object in a condition to be taken out in its entirety. We did collect some minerals from a huge pile of fallen ones, though, including some greenish soap stone fragments whose round and vague five-point patterns of grouped dots led to so many dubious comparisons; and some fossilized bones, among these are the most typical of the oddly injured specimens.

The Elder Things's