The Mountains Of Madness
Part 2

In many places, the buildings were completely destroyed and the ice sheets were smoldering for various geological reasons. In other places the stone was used up to the level of glaciation. A vast swath, stretching from the interior of the plateau to a crack at the foot of the hill about a mile to the left of the pass through, was entirely free of buildings; and perhaps, we conclude, we conclude, the path of a great river which at the time of Tertiary — millions of years ago — has flowed through the city and into some incredible underground ravines of the great barrier ranks. Of course, this was above all the areas of caves, ravines, and underground secrets beyond human penetration.

Looking back to our sensations, and remembering the confusion we saw this terrible survival of the times we had thought before man, he said, I can only wonder that we maintain the semblance of balance that we do. Of course we know that something — chronology, scientific theory, or our own consciousness — is sad; however we are quiet enough to guide the plane, observing things very closely, we are very calm, and take a series of careful photos that may not have benefited us and the world. In my case, the ingrained scientific habit may have helped; because above all my confusion and sense of threat there burns the dominant curiosity to understand more than this ancient secret — to know what kind of creatures have built and lived in a giant place these innumerable, and what their relation to the general world of his time or other times was so unique that the concentration of life could have taken place.

This place may not be an ordinary city. It must have formed the central and central core of several ancient and hard-to-believe chapters of earth history whose outward consequences, which are only revealed vaguely in the most obscure and distorted of myths, are, it has disappeared completely amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before the human race we know has collapsed out of dominance. Here lay the palaeogean megalopolis compared to the fables of Atlantis and Lemuria, the Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoe in the land of Lomar is the present day — not even yesterday;  rank megalopolis with whispered pre-human blasphemy such as Valusia, Rlylyly, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City of Deserta Arabia. As we flew over the tangle of those striking titan towers, the, my imagination sometimes escapes all the boundaries and darts aimlessly in the fantastic field of association — even the tangle of relationships between this lost world and some of my wildest dreams of crazy horrors in camp.

Aircraft fuel tanks, in the interest of greater illumination, are only partially filled; therefore we must now exercise caution in our exploration. Even so, however, we traveled a very wide land — or rather, air — after dipping to a level where the wind became almost negligible. There seems to be no limit to the mountains, or the length of the fearsome stone town bordering the inner foothills. Fifty miles of flight in each direction showed no major changes in the maze of rocks and rocks clawing corpses like corpses through the eternal ice. However, there are some very absorbent diversifications; such as carvings in canyons where the vast river once penetrated the foothills and approached where it sank within a wide range. The headlands at the river entrance have been boldly carved into the Cyclopean columns; and something of a stern design, shaped like a barrel, evokes a strange, hateful, and confusing obscurity, both at Danforth and me.

We also found some open, star-shaped space, clearly a public square; and recorded various undulations in the terrain. Where a steep hill rises, it is generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling stone building; but there are at least two exceptions. Of the latter, the one is too bad weather to reveal what is in the jutting eminence, while others still wear fantastic conical monuments carved from solid rock and roughly resemble things like the famous Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra.

So far we have not made landfall, have not left the plateau without the effort of entering some monstrous structures would be unimaginable. We therefore decided to find a smooth spot at the foot of the hill near our navigation path, there landing the plane and preparing for exploration on foot. Although this gradual slope was partly covered with scattering ruins, the low flight soon revealed many possible landing sites. Choosing the closest to the gap, as our next flight would cross a wide range and return to camp, we made it around 12:30 p.m. To get off on a smooth, hard snow field that has absolutely no obstacles and adapts well to a quick and pleasant takeoff.

It seems unnecessary to protect the aircraft by banking snow for such a short time and so comfortably in the absence of strong winds at this level; therefore we only see that ski landings are safely nested, and that important parts of the mechanism are protected from the cold. For our foot trips, we threw away our heaviest flying feathers, and brought small clothes consisting of a pocket compass, hand camera, light fixtures, notebooks and plenty of paper, he said, geologists' hammers and chisels, specimen bags, climbing rope coils, and powerful electric torches with extra batteries; these equipment have been carried inside the plane in the hope we can make a landing, take ground drawings, make topographic drawings and sketches, and get rock specimens from some bare slope, outcrop, or mountain cave. Fortunately we had an additional supply of paper to shred, put in a spare specimen bag, he said, and it is used on the ancient principle of rabbits and dogs to mark our way in every interior maze we may be able to penetrate. This has been brought in case we find some cave systems with air that is quiet enough to allow a quick and easy method in place of the usual chipping-rock method of trail-blazing.

The Elder Things's