The Mountains Of Madness
Part 2

This vast bay has undoubtedly been used by the great river that flows down from the nameless and terrible mountains of the west, and the previous one turned at the base of the Old Ones lineup and flowed beside that chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten Landing on the Wilkes coastline. Little by little he gnawed at the base of the limestone hill at its turn, until finally the stuffy current reached the groundwater caves and joined them in digging deeper ravines. Eventually the whole section was emptied into hollow hills and left the old bed to the dry sea. Most of the later cities as we now find have been built on beds before. Old People, understanding what has happened, and using their ever-sharp, artistic senses, it has carved ornate columns on headlands at the foot of hills where great currents begin to descend into eternal darkness.

This river, once crossed by a number of precious stone bridges, is clearly a river whose extinction we have witnessed in our aircraft survey. His position in various city sculptures helped us orient ourselves to the scene as it happened at various stages of old history that were dead; so we can sketch a hasty but careful map of the features that stand out — boxes, important buildings, and the like — for guidance in further exploration. We can immediately reconstruct very fondly the whole extraordinary thing like a million or ten million or fifty million years ago, because the statues tell us exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs look like and what the Tertiary landscape and vegetation settings look like. It definitely has an incredible and mystical beauty, and when I think about it, it has, I had almost forgotten the sinister sense of oppression that made the inhumane age and cruelty of this city and the death and remoteness and twilight of the glacier suffocate and weigh on my spirit. But according to certain engravings, the inhabitants of the city themselves have known the oppressive grip of terror; because there is a kind of gloomy and repetitive scene where Old People are shown in the act of properly crawling from an object — is never allowed to appear in the design — found in the big river and it is indicated to have drifted through the curling, cycad forests of vines from the terrible mountains to the west.

It was only in one house that was built later with decadent carvings that we obtained the shadow of the last disastrous omen that led to the desertion of the city. There are undoubtedly many statues of the same age elsewhere, even allowing for energy and aspiration to slacken from periods of stress and uncertainty; indeed, it is, very definite evidence of the existence of others came to us shortly after. But this was the first and only set we met in person. We intend to look further later; but as I have said, immediate conditions define other goals at this time. However, there will be a limit of — because however the hope of occupancy of the place in the old future has vanished among the Old People, nothing can stop the decoration of the mural. The ultimate blow, of course, is the coming of the cold that once ruled much of the earth, and which never strayed from the poles of the bad luck of the — cold that, at the extremities of the other world, had, end to the fairyland of Lomar and Hyperborea.

Just when this trend started in Antarctica, it would be hard to say in the right years. We currently set the beginning of a general glacial period at a distance of about 500,000 years from now, but at the poles terrible disasters must have begun much earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly conjectural; but it is very likely that decadent statues were made less than a million years ago, he said, and that the actual desertion of the city was completed long before the conventional opening of Pleistocene — 500,000 years ago — as taken into account in terms of the whole earth's surface.

In the end it seems to be the neighboring ravine that received the greatest colonization. This is in part due, no doubt, to the traditional sanctity of this major region; but it may be more conclusively determined by the opportunity it provides to continue the use of the great temples in the honey-nesting mountains, he said, and to defend the vast mainland city as a summer residence and communication base with various mines. The linkages of old and new dwellings are made more effective with some gradation and improvement along the connecting routes, the, including the carvings of many tunnels directly from the ancient metropolis city to the black abyss — sharp tunnels down which our mouths carefully draw, according to our most thoughtful estimates, the most thoughtful, on the guide map we compiled. It is evident that at least two of these tunnels were within reasonable exploratory distance of where we were; both were on the edge of the city mountain, one less than a quarter of a mile into the ancient stream, the, and the other may be twice that distance in the opposite direction.

The ravine seems to have dry beach shelves in certain places; but the Old One built their new city under water — no doubt because of the greater certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden ocean seems to be huge, so the internal heat of the earth can ensure its habitability for an indefinite amount of time. The creatures seem to have no difficulty in adjusting themselves to the part-time — and finally, of course, the whole time — lives underwater; because they never let their gill systems stop developing. There are many statues that show how they always frequented their relatives on submarines elsewhere, and how they usually bathed in the deep riverbed. The darkness of the inner earth can also be a deterrent to a race accustomed to long Antarctic nights.