The Mountains Of Madness
Part 3

Walking cautiously down the snow on the crusted snow towards the incredible stone maze towering westward that mingled, we felt the same sense of imminent astonishment, he said, as we felt as we approached the unexpected mountain passing through the track four hours earlier. True, we became visually accustomed to the incredible secret hidden by the peak of the barrier; yet the prospect of actually entering the ancient wall maintained by conscious beings perhaps millions of years ago — before any human race could exist — is no less awesome and potentially terrifying in its implications against cosmic disorder. Despite the thinness of the air at these incredible altitudes it made the exertion somewhat more difficult than usual; both Danforth and I found ourselves defending very well, and feel on par with almost any task that might fall to our fate.  It only took a few steps to get us to the worn-out shapeless ruins with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods further there was a huge roofless fortress that was still complete in a big five pointed line and rose to a height of ten or irregular. For the latter we headed; and when finally we could actually touch the weathered Cyclopean blocks, the, we feel that we have built an unprecedented and almost blasphemous relationship with the forgotten kappa that is usually closed to our species.

This fortress, shaped like a star and perhaps 300 feet from point to point, was built from Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6 × 8 feet on the surface. There is a row of slits or arched windows about four feet wide and five feet high; spaced fairly symmetrically along the points of the star and at its inner corners, and with a bottom about four feet from a thin surface. Looking through this, we can see that the stone is entirely five feet thick, that there are no partitions left in it, and that there are traces of banded carvings or reliefs on the interior walls; a fact that we had already guessed before, when flying low above this fortress and others liked it. Although the lower parts must have existed, all traces of such objects were now completely obscured by the deep layers of ice and snow at this point.

We crawled through one of the windows and in vain tried to decipher the design of the mural that was almost gone, but did not try to disturb the skinny floor. Our onboarding flights have indicated that many buildings in the city proper are less choking on ice, and that we might find a completely clear interior leads to the actual ground level if we enter a still roofed building at the top. Before we left the fort, we photographed it carefully, and studied the mortarless Cyclopean stone in confusion. We hope Pabodie is there, as his engineering knowledge might help us guess how such a giant block could have been handled in a very remote age when the city and its suburbs were built.

Half a mile runs down the hill to the real city, with the upper wind screaming vainly and viciously through the peaks of the sky in the background, it is something whose smallest detail will always be etched into my mind. Only in a nightmare could there be a human, except Danforth and I who imagined such an optical effect. Between us and the turbulent vapors of the west lay a dreadful tangle of dark stone towers; their magnificent and magnificent shapes kept us refreshed at every new vantage point. It was a mirage on a solid rock, and had it not been for the photos, I still doubt it. The general type of masonry is identical to the fortress we have examined; but the luxurious forms taken by this stone in its manifestations in urban areas have gone through all the descriptions.

Even the images only described one or two phases of his infinite dishonesty, endless variations, his massive pre-natural nature, and completely alien exoticism. There are geometric shapes in which Euclid can hardly find the name of — cones of all levels of irregularity and cutting; terraces of all sorts of provocative disproportions; shafts with strange bulb magnification; the columns broke in curious groups; and crazy arrangements that tipped five or five jagged. As we got closer, we could see under certain transparent parts of the ice sheet, and detect several tube-shaped stone bridges connecting structures sprinkled at various heights. From the seemingly non-existent regular streets, the only wide open plots were a mile to the left, where an ancient river without a doubt flowed through the city into the mountains.

When we finally dove into the labyrinth city itself, climbing up the fallen and shrinking masonry of oppressive proximity and the dwarf heights of crumbling walls and potholes everywhere, our sensation again became such that I was amazed at the amount of self-control we maintained. Danforth was frankly agitated, and started making some irrelevant offensive speculations about the horrors in camp — which further upset me because I couldn't help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by the many features of the continuity this terrible life from the age of nightmares. Speculation also worked on his imagination; for in one place — where the debris-strewn passage turned sharply — he insisted that he saw a faint trace of a land mark which he did not like; while elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle imaginary sound from an unspecified point — muffling music sound, he said, it was no different from the wind in the caves on the mountain yet it was somehow very different. The unrelenting wholeness of the five points of the surrounding architecture and of some distinguishable arabesque murals has a grim suggestion that we cannot avoid; and it gives us a touch of monstrous unconscious certainty about the primal entities that have raised and dwelt in this unexalted place.

The Gateway to The Elder Things City