The Mountains Of Madness
CHAPTER V (Part 1)

I thought that the two of us were simultaneously shouting in awe, wonder, terror, and disbelief in our own senses when we finally cleared the gap and saw what was behind it. Of course we must have a natural theory behind our heads to ascertain our current capabilities. Maybe we think of things like bad rocks from the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or fantastic symmetrical wind-carved rocks in the Arizona desert. Perhaps we even half regard the scene as a mirage as we saw the morning before when we first approached the mountains of madness. We should have some normal idea of falling back when our eyes sweep across the bloodless plateau, the tempest and capture the maze of colossal, orderly, masses, and the almost endless geometries that geometrically give rise to the masses of rock that break down and circle the peaks above the ice sheet. the depth is no more than forty or fifty feet, the, and in clearly thinner places.

The effects of the terrifying scene were indescribable, as some violations of natural laws were known to be evil at first. Here, on an ancient tableland very high, 20,000 feet high, and in a deadly climate to be inhabited since pre-human age no less than 500,000 years ago, there lay almost to the limit of sight an orderly thread of stone that was just desperate. Mental self-defense could possibly be linked to anything but conscious and artificial causes. We have previously rejected, as far as serious thought is concerned, any theory that holds that the cube and the citadel on the side of the mountain are other than natural. How can they be otherwise, when man himself is almost indistinguishable from the great apes at a time when this region succumbed to an unbroken reign of glacial death?

But now the wobble of reason seems to be shaken, because this square, curved, and sloping block maze has features that cut through all comfortable protection. Clearly, it is a mirage city of mirages in a real, objective, and inescapable reality. The unlucky sign turned out to have a material base — there was a horizontal layer of ice-dust in the upper air, and the survival of this shocking rock had projected its image across the mountains according to the simple law of reflection. Of course the ghost was twisted and exaggerated, and contained things that the original source did not contain; yet now, when we looked at the actual source, it was, we think it's more gruesome and menacing than its distant image.

Only the extraordinary and inhumane furore of these massive stone towers and forts has saved the monstrous creature from total destruction in the hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — years ago had been pondering there amidst the gloomy highland explosion. “Corona Mundi.  .  .  Roof of the World.  .  " All sorts of fantastic expressions appeared on our lips as we looked dizzyly at the incredible spectacle. I thought again of the primal eldritch myth that has constantly haunted me since my first view of this dead world of Antarctica — about the Daemoniac plateau in Leng, the Mi-Go people, the, or the Great Snowmen of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscript with their pre-human implications, the cult of Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and the, and the Hyperborean legends of Tsathoggua are shapeless and worse than the shapeless stars associated with semi-entities.

For endless miles in all directions it stretched with very little thinning; indeed, it did, as our eyes followed him to the right and to the left along the low foothills that gradually separated him from the edge of the actual mountain, he said, we decided that we could not see any thinning at all except for the disturbance to the left of the gap. Through which we came. We just attacked, randomly, a finite part of something countless. The foothills are more rarely sprinkled with strange stone structures, linking the monstrous city with familiar cubes and forts that apparently form its mountain outpost. The latter, as well as the strange mouth of the cave, was as thick on the inside as on the outer side of the mountain range.

The entire fabric of the weather was very bad, and the glacier surface on which the tower was projected was full of fallen beams and ancient debris. If the glaciation was transparent, we could see the bottom of the giant pile, and notice the stone bridges preserved with ice connecting the various towers at various distances above the ground. On the exposed walls we can detect scarred places where other and higher bridges of the same type exist. A closer inspection revealed countless large windows; some of them were covered with shutters of petrified material originally made of wood, and some were covered with wooden shutters, although it is mostly open in a creepy and threatening way. Many of the ruins, of course, are unroofed, and with uneven top edges despite being winding; while others, are, from a cone or pyramidal model that is sharper or protected by a higher surrounding structure, it retains the outline intact despite some collapsing and perforated. With the glass of the field we can hardly see what appears to be a sculptural decoration in the horizontal band — decoration includes a group of strange dots whose presence in the ancient soap stone now has a distant meaning greater.

The Elder Things's