The Mountains Of Madness
Part 2
As the newspapers reported, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2, 1930; took a leisurely stroll down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopped at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, stopping at the Panama Canal, where's the last place we took the last supplies. None of our exploration parties have ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all rely heavily on our ship captain — J. B. Douglas, leading the Arkham brig, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, leading the Miskatonic — barkat are both veteran whalers in the Antarctic waters. As we leave the inhabited world behind the sun sinks it gets lower in the north, and stays longer and longer over the horizon every day. At about 62 ° Southern Latitudes, we saw our first iceberg - a table-like object with a vertical side - and just before it reached the Antarctic Circle, the one we crossed on October 20th with the right weird ceremony, we were very troubled with the ice in the field. The falling temperatures disturbed me greatly after our long journey in the tropics, but I tried to prepare for the worse difficulties to come. On many occasions, the strange atmospheric effects fascinated me; this includes a very clear mirage of — that I first saw — where distant bergs become unimaginable fortresses of cosmic fortresses.
Pushing through the ice, which fortunately is not extensive or dense, we regain open water at South Latitude 67 °, East Longitude 175 °. On the morning of October 26, a strong "land blink" appeared in the south, and before noon we all felt excitement at the sight of the vast, tall, mountain chain, and snow-covered that opened up and covered the entire scene in front. Finally we met with an outpost of a large unknown continent and a faint frozen world of death. These peaks are clearly the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, the, and it is now our duty to circle Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated headquarters on the shores of McMurdo Sound at the foot of the Erebus volcano in the South. Latitude 77 ° 9 ′.
The last round of the voyage was clear and stirring, the great barren mystery peaks constantly towered west as the low northern sun in daylight or the low middle southern sun grazing in the middle of the night spilled a faint reddish glow in the top white.snow, bluish ice and waterways, and black pieces of exposed granite slopes. Through the silent peaks swept a raging rage from the criss-crossing Antarctic winds; whose rhythms sometimes give vague suggestions of wild and half-living piping of music, with the tone extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious reason mnemonic to me feels restless and even very terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing paintings of Nicholas Roerich in Asia, and of the more bizarre descriptions of the famous Leng fairyland plateau, the, what happens in the terrifying Necronomicon of a mad Arab named Abdul Alhazred. I somewhat regretted, then, that I had ever looked into the horrible book in the college library.
On the seventh of November, the view of the western reach had been lost for a while, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descended the Mts cone. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with a long line of the Parry Mountains outside. There now lies to the east a low white line of a large ice barrier; towering perpendicular to a height of 200 feet like the Quebec rock cliffs, and marking the end of navigation to the south. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood offshore in the smoking area of Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak rises 12,700 feet into the eastern sky, like the sacred Japanese Fujiyama print; while above it rises a white height, like a ghost on Mt. Terror, 10,900 feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano. Smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the — graduate assistants a bright young man named Danforth — showed what looked like lava on a snowy slope; stating that this mountain, a, discovered in 1840, it undoubtedly became the source of Poe's drawings when he wrote seven years later.
“—Lava rolling on fidget
Their sulfur current is down Yaanek
At the top of polik—
In nature polar boreal.”
Danforth is a great reader of strange materials, and has talked a lot about Poe. I was drawn to myself because the Antarctic scene is the only disturbing and enigmatic Arthur Gordon Pym — Poe <TAG1> long story. On the barren coast, and in the high ice barrier in the background, millions of strange penguins squawk and flap their fins; while many fat seals are seen in the water, millions of strange penguins squawk and flap their fins, swim or lie on a large cake of ice that drifts slowly.
Using a small boat, we made a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after midnight on the morning of the 9th, carry a cable line from each ship and get ready to dismantle the supply by using a pants-baiting arrangement. Our sensation of the first interarctic land to tread is very complicated and complex, although at this point Scott and Shackleton's expeditions have preceded us. Our campgrounds on the frozen beach below the slopes of the volcano are only temporary; the headquarters are kept in Arkham. We land all drilling equipment, dogs, sleds, tents, supplies, gas tanks, experimental ice melting suits, ordinary and aviation cameras, aircraft parts, and other accessories, he said, these include three small portable wireless outfits (other than those on board) capable of communicating with Arkham's large outfits from any part of the Antarctic continent we might visit. The ship's outfit, communicating with the outside world, is to deliver a press report to Arkham Advertiser's powerful wireless station in Kingsport Head, Mass. We hope to finish our work for one summer in Antarctica; but if this proves impossible, we will winter in Arkham, send the Miskatonic north before freezing the ice for another summer supply.
I don't need to repeat what the newspapers have already posted about our initial work: about our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mining of minerals at some point on Ross Island and the incredible speed achieved by Pabodie equipment, even through solid rock layers; our interim tests of small ice-liquefying equipment; our dangerous ascent of a large barrier with sleds and supplies; and our final assembly of five large aircraft at the camp above the barrier. The health of our ground party — twenty men and 55 dogs launcher Alaska — is amazing, although of course so far we have not found a truly destructive temperature or windstorm. For the most part, thermometers vary between zero and 20 ° or 25 ° above, and our experience with winters in New England has gotten us used to the rigors of this type. The barrier camp was semi-permanent, and was destined to become a storage area for gasoline, supplies, dynamite, and other supplies. Only four of our planes are needed to carry actual browsing material, the fifth was left with a pilot and two men from the ship in the storage shed to form a means to reach us from Arkham if all our exploration planes were lost. Then, when not using all the other aircraft for moving equipment, we will use one or two in shuttle transportation services between this cache and other permanent bases on the plateau from 600 to 700 miles to the south, outside Beardmore Glacier. Despite an almost unanimous record of monstrous winds and tempests descending from the plateau, we are determined to dispose of the intermediary base; taking our chances for economic benefit and possible efficiency.
The Elder