The Mountains Of Madness
Part 2

Although able, like vegetables, to obtain nutrients from inorganic substances; they are very fond of organic and especially animal foods. They eat raw marine biota under the sea, but cook their food on land. They hunt game animals and raise livestock — slaughtered with sharp weapons that have strange markings on certain fossil bones recorded by our expedition. They resist all extraordinary temperatures; and in their natural state they can live in water until frozen. However, when the great cold of the Pleistocene began to appear — almost a million years ago — the inhabitants of the land had to take special measures including artificial heating; until finally the deadly cold seemed to have driven them back into the sea. For their prehistoric flight through cosmic space, legend has it, they have absorbed certain chemicals and become virtually independent of feeding, breathing, or heat conditions; the researchers said; but in the time of the great cold they had lost track of this method.  However they cannot extend artificial conditions indefinitely without harm.

Being non-pair and semi-vegetable in structure, the Old has no biological basis for the family phase of mammalian life; but it seems to organize a large household based on the principles of convenient space utility and — as we conclude from the work described in the picture and the diversion of fellow residents — pleasant mental associations. In complementing their homes, they store everything in the middle of large rooms, leaving all the wall space free for decorative treatments. Illumination, in the case of land dwellers, is carried out with a device that may be electro-chemical in nature. Both on land and under water, they use tables, chairs, and so on, and odd sofas like — cylindrical frames because they rest and sleep upright with — folded tentacles and shelves for the hinged surface sets that make up their books.

The government is obviously complex and perhaps socialistic, although no certainty in this can be inferred from the statues we see. There was extensive trade, both local and between different cities; the small, flat, five-pointed and inscribed counters, served as money. Perhaps the smaller of the various greenish soap stones discovered by our expedition were pieces of such currency. Although the culture was primarily urban, few farms and many supplies existed. Mining and production in limited quantities are also carried out. Travel is very common, but permanent migration seems relatively rare except for the extensive colonization movements in which the race develops. For private locomotion, no external assistance is used; for in ground, air, and water movements as well as the Old One it seems to have a very large capacity for speed. However, the charge is drawn by the wild beast — shoggoths under the sea, and a variety of strange primitive vertebrates in the last years of land existence.

These vertebrates, also infinity of other life forms — animals and vegetables, sea, land, land, and earth — is a product of unguided evolution that works on the cells of life made by Old People but escapes their radius of attention. They have suffered to develop uncontrollably because they do not come in conflict with the dominant being. Disturbing forms are, of course, destroyed mechanically. This drew us to see in some of the most recent and most decadent statues of chaotic primitive mammals, sometimes used for food and sometimes as playful clowns by land dwellers, he said, the vague simian and human shadow cannot be mistaken anymore. In building cities, large stone blocks of tall towers were generally lifted by the large winged pterodactyls of a species hitherto unknown to paleontology.

With a new land upheaval in the South Pacific, extraordinary events begin. Some sea cities were hopelessly destroyed, yet it was not the worst misfortune. Other races — races of land creatures shaped like octopuses and possibly matching the prodigious pre-human seed of Cthulhu — soon begin to filter down from cosmic infinity and spark a terrifying war that while time pushed the Old Men fully back into the sea— a colossal blow given the increasing settlement. Later peace was made, and new lands were given to the seedlings of Cthulhu while the Old held the sea and older lands. New mainland cities established — the largest in Antarctica, because this first arrival region is sacred. Since then, as before, Antarctica has remained the center of the Old Ones civilization, and all the discoverable cities built there by Cthulhu seedlings were eliminated. Then suddenly the Pacific mainland sinks again, bringing with them the fearsome stone town of R'lyeh and all the cosmic octopuses, the, so the Old People are once again the tallest on the planet except for one dark fear they don't like to talk about. At a somewhat older age, their cities adorn all the land areas and waters of the world — therefore, the, the recommendation in my upcoming monograph that some archaeologists do systematic blocking with this type of Pabodie equipment in certain regions that are far apart.

The steady trend of the era was from water to land; a movement driven by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never entirely deserted. Another cause of movement inland is the new difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths on which successful marine life rests. Over the course of time, as the statues sadly admit, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter has been lost; so the Old must rely on the mold of existing forms. On land, large reptiles proved to be very easy to trace; but the sea sheath, which reproduces by fission and acquires a dangerous degree of fortuitous intelligence, temporarily presents a severe problem.