The Mountains Of Madness
Part 3
Wireless reports have been talking about the non-stop four-hour flight of our squadron on November 21 on high ice shelves, with vast peaks rising in the west, he said, and an unexpected silence echoed into the sound of our machine. The wind just bothered us, and our radio compass helped us through one of the blurry fogs we encountered. When the big hike looms ahead, between Latitude 83 ° and 84 °, we know we have reached the Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world, he said, and that the frozen sea now gives place to a wrinkled and mountainous coastline. Eventually we actually entered a white world, dead-and-dead from the main south, and even when we realized it we saw the summit of Mt. Nansen is in the east, towering to a height of nearly 15,000 feet.
Successful establishment of south base on top of glacier at Latitude 86 ° 7′, East Longitude 174 ° 23′, East Longitude 174 ′, and the extraordinarily fast and effective mining and explosion created at various points reached by our sled trips and short airplane flights, is a matter of history; he said; it was like a difficult and triumphant climb of the mountain. Nansen by Pabodie and two graduate students — Gedney and Carroll — on December 13-15. We were about 8,500 feet above sea level, and when experimental drilling revealed solid ground just twelve feet below snow and ice at certain points, the researchers said, we used a lot of melting equipment and sinking drill bits and did dynamization in many places where no explorer had ever before thought of securing mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granite and flare sandstones obtained confirm our belief that the plateau is homogeneous with most of the continents in the west, but it is somewhat different from the parts that stretch eastward under South America — which we then thought would form a separate and separate region. The smaller continent is divided from the larger by the frozen junction of the Ross and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since refuted that hypothesis.
In some particular sandstone, dynamite and chiseled after boring revealing its properties, we found some very interesting fossil marks and fragments — especially ferns, seaweed, trilobites, crinoids, and other, and mollusks like the lingula and the — gasteropods all seem very important in relation to the primordial history of the region. There is also a strange triangular sign, striated about a foot in the largest diameter that Lake holds together from three slate fragments brought from a large hole. These fragments came from a point to the west, near the Queen's Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find a strange mark that was both confusing and provocative, albeit to my geological eye, it looked nothing like some fairly common ripple effects in sedimentary rocks. Because slate is nothing more than a metamorphic formation in which layers of sediment are pressed, and because the pressure itself produces a strange effect on the markings that may be present, I see no reason for the extreme wonder of striated depression.
On January 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, the six students, four mechanics, and I flew directly over the south pole with two large planes, forced down once by a sudden strong wind that fortunately did not develop. It becomes a special storm. This, as the newspaper states, is one of several observation flights; during the others we try to distinguish new topographical features in areas not yet covered by previous explorers. Our early flights were disappointing in terms of the latter; though they do give us some amazing examples of the fantastically rich and deceptive mirages in the polar regions, they did, which sea trip we've given us some brief forecasting. The distant mountains floated in the sky as magical cities, and often the entire white world would dissolve into a land of gold, silver, and silver, and the dark red of Dunsanian dreams and hopes full of adventure under the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had a lot of difficulty in flying, due to the tendency of the earth and snowy sky to merge into one empty mystic void with no visible horizon to mark the intersection of the two.
The outside world knows, of course, about our programs, and being told also about Lake's strange and steady insistence on a prospective trip westward — or rather northwestward before our radical shift to a new base. It seemed that he had contemplated many things, and with very radical courage, on top of the triangular striated mark on the blackboard; reading into it certain contradictions in Nature and the geological period that aroused his curiosity, and got him excited to drown more buildup and explosions in the west-stretching formation where the fragments dug up turned out to belong. He strangely believed that the sign was the mold of a large, unclassifiable organism that was enormous, unknown, and of advanced evolution, although the stone that wears it is a very ancient date — Cambria if not really pre-Cambrian — to hinder the possibility of the existence not only of all highly evolved life, but from any life above unicellular or at most at the trilobite stage. These fragments, with their odd markings, must be 500 million to a thousand million years old.
The Elder