The Mountains Of Madness
Part 2

Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and open a row of crazy graves with five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help but notice the resemblance of these terrible mounds, with groups of dots grouped, with poor Lake descriptions of the strange greenish-colored soap stones; and when we found ourselves some soap stones in a big pile of minerals, we found the resemblance very close. The whole general formation, it must be clarified, appears suggestive of the star heads of the Archaean entities; and we agree that the suggestion must have worked well on the sensitive minds of the over-busy Lake party.  Our own first look at the buried entities that actually shaped the terrible moment, and sent the imagination of Pabodie and I back to some of the startling myths that we had read and heard. We all agree that the sheer sight and the constant presence of those objects must have been compromised by the oppressive polar silence and the mountain breeze of the daemon in driving Lake's party crazy.

For the madness of — centered in Gedney as the only surviving agent — is an explanation that is adopted spontaneously by everyone as far as spoken speech is concerned; although I would not be so naive as to deny that each of us may have a wild guess whose sanity forbids it to formulate it completely. Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe cruise aboard a plane across the surrounding area in the afternoon, sweeping the horizon with field glasses in search of Gedney and the various things he lost; the; but nothing was revealed. The party reported that the range of the titan barrier extends endlessly to the right and left alike, without any reduction in height or important structures. However, at some summits, the usual cube and fortress formations are bolder and clearer; having a very fantastic parable for the ruins of the Asian hills that Roerich painted. The distribution of the faint cave mouths on the snow-capped black peak seemed roughly even as far as its range could be traced.

Despite all the horrors that exist, we are left with enough scientific spirit and adventure to wonder about an unknown world beyond those mysterious mountains. As stated by our closely guarded messages, we rest in the middle of the night after our day of terror and confusion; but it is not without tentative plans for one or several cross-border high-altitude flights in a brightly lit aircraft with aerial cameras and geologists' suits, starting the next morning. It was decided that Danforth and I tried it first, and we woke up at 7am intending to travel early; he said; although the strong winds of — mentioned in our short newsletter to the outside world — delay us until almost nine o'clock.

I've repeated the noncommittal story we told to the people at camp — and went outside — after we returned sixteen hours later. Now it is my dreadful duty to strengthen this story by filling the merciful void with clues about what we are actually witnessing in the hidden trans-montane world — hints about the eventual revelation made Danforth collapse nervously. I hope he will add a really honest word about something he thinks only he witnessed — although maybe it was just a nervous delusion — and that may have been the last straw that put him in the place; but he was resolutely against it. All I could do was repeat his then disjointed whispers of what made him scream as the plane soared back through the wind-tortured mountain pass after the real, real shock I had doled. This will form my last word. If the obvious signs of old horror are surviving in what I am revealing is not enough to prevent others from interfering with Antarctica in — or at least from prying too deep beneath the surface the wastage of forbidden and inhumane, desolate secrets that condemned — responsibility for crimes that cannot be named and may not be measurable will not be mine.

Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie on an afternoon flight and checking with the sextant, have calculated that the lowest fitting available in range lies somewhat to our right, he said, in view of the camp, it is about 23,000 or 24,000 feet above sea level. To this point, then, we first headed for the bright plane when we started our discovery flight. The camp itself, at the foot of a hill emerging from the continental plateau, is about 12,000 feet high; hence the actual elevation increase required is not as extensive as it may seem.  Nonetheless, we were well aware of the rare air and the intense cold as we got up; because due to visibility conditions we had to leave the cabin windows open. We dressed, of course, with our heaviest fur.

But the clutter on the mountain side of the cube, the castle, and the mouth of the cave most fascinated and disturbed us. I studied it with field glass and took the final photos while Danforth was driving; and sometimes freed him in control - although my flight knowledge was purely amateur - to let him use binoculars. We can easily see that most of the materials of those objects are light Archaean quartzite, unlike any formation seen in a general surface area; and that their regularity is extreme and overwhelming to the point that poor Lake hardly hints.

As he said, the edges were shattered and rounded from the incalculable bad weather; but their pre-natural solidity and hard material had saved them from destruction. Many parts, especially those closest to the slope, appear substantially identical to the surrounding rock surface. The entire arrangement looks like the ruins of Machu Picchu in the Andes, or the main foundation wall of Kish excavated by the Oxford-Field Expedition Museum in 1929; and neither Danforth nor I get the occasional impression of the separate Cyclopean blocks that Lake attributed to Carroll, his traveling companion.  How to explain things like that in this place is frankly out of my reach, and I feel humble as a geologist. The Igneous formations often have a strange regularity — like the famous Causeway Giants in Ireland — but this amazing range, despite Lake's original suspicion of smoking cones, is amazing, above all non-volcanic in a clear structure.

The Elder Things's