The Mountains Of Madness
CHAPTER IV (Part 1)

Only with great hesitation and rejection, I let my mind go back to camp Lake and what we really found there — and to everything else beyond the fearsome mountain walls. I am constantly tempted to ignore the details, and to let the clues stand up to the actual facts and inevitable deductions. I wish I had said enough to let me slide for a while about the rest; the rest, that is, the horrors in the camp. I have told you about wind-stricken areas, broken shelters, messy machines, the various jitters of our dogs, lost sleds and other items, he said, the deaths of humans and dogs, the absence of Gedney, and the six biologically insanely buried specimens, strangely texture deep for all their structural injuries, from a world forty million years dead. I can't remember if I mentioned that while examining the dead body of the dog we found one missing dog. We didn't think much about it until later — indeed, only Danforth and I thought about it at all.

The essentials I have maintained are related to bodies, and at certain subtle points that may or may not give a terrible and overwhelming rational reason for the seeming chaos. At that time I was trying to keep the minds of the men away from those points; because it was much simpler — was much more normal — to put everything on the madness plague part Lake side. From the look of the objects, the wind of the daemon mountain was enough to make everyone angry amidst the center of all this earthly mystery and destruction.

Severe abnormalities, of course, are a bad body condition— for both men and dogs. They were all in some sort of terrible conflict, and were torn apart and shattered apart in in inexplicable ways. Death, as far as we can judge, in each case comes from strangulation or lacerations. The dogs had clearly started the problem, as the state of their poorly constructed enclosure testified to its damage by force from within. It had been set some distance away from the camp due to a hatred of animals for the evil Archaean organism, but precautions seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in the terrible wind behind the thin wall with insufficient height, they must have trampled — either from the wind itself, or from the unpleasant smell, he said, the rising ones emitted by the nightmare specimens, one cannot say. The specimens, of course, had been covered with a tent cloth; yet the low antarctic sun continued to pulsate over the cloth, and Lake has mentioned that the heat of the sun tends to make the network of hard and strange objects relax and expand. Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth from above them, and pushed them in such a way that their sharper olfactory qualities became apparent despite their remarkable antiquity.

But whatever happened, it was horrible and pretty disgusting. Maybe I better put aside the nausea and say the worst in the end — albeit with a categorical statement of opinion, based on direct observation and rigid deduction from Danforth and myself, he said, that Gedney who went missing back then was completely irresponsible for the disgusting horrors we found. I have said that the bodies were falling apart. Now I must add that some are sliced and reduced in the most bizarre, cold-blooded, and inhumane way. It is the same with dogs and humans. All bodies that are healthier, fatter, quadrupedal or two-legged, have the most dense mass of tissue cut and removed, as by a careful butcher; and around them there was a strange salt splash — taken from the chest of the broken supplies on the plane — which gave rise to the most terrible associations. It happened in one of the rough airplane shelters from which the plane was dragged out, and the subsequent wind had eliminated all paths that could provide a plausible theory.  A scattered piece of clothing, roughly cut from the subject of a human incision, showed no clues.  There is no point in bringing up half the impression of a vague snowmold in one of the sheltered corners of the destroyed enclosure — because the impression does not concern human prints at all, he said, but it's clearly mixed up with all the talk of a bad fossil print. The lake had been giving all the weeks before. One must be careful of their imagination which continues to be awkward and overshadow the madness of the mountain.

This is the worst of the horrors of the camp, but other things are just as confusing. The disappearance of Gedney, one dog, eight unharmed biological specimens, three sleds, and a particular instrument, describes technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches and batteries, and the, food and fuel, heating devices, spare tents, fur coats, and the like, were absolutely sane; so were patches of ink splattering on a certain piece of paper, he said, and evidence of strange aliens groping and experimenting around planes and all other mechanical equipment both in camps and in boring places. The dogs seemed to hate this irregular machine. Then, too, there is the anxiety of the cupboard, the disappearance of certain staples, and the jarring pile of tin cans opened in the most unlikely ways and in the most unlikely places. The number of matches scattered, intact, damaged, or spent, forms another small puzzle; just like the two or three tents of cloth and fur coats we found lying with strange and unusual slashes due to the unimaginable awkward attempts of adaptation. The mistreatment of human and dog bodies, and the insane burial of damaged Archaean specimens, are all part of this apparent disintegrative madness. Given the possibilities as they exist today, we carefully photograph all the main evidence of insane disorder in the camp; and will use the prints to support our plea for the proposed departure of the Starkweather-Moore Expedition.

The Elder Things's