The Mountains Of Madness
Part 4's

When we stepped out into the incredible half-day light of the bottom of this giant cylinder — was fifty million years old, he said, and without a doubt the most ancient ancient structures that have ever met our eyes — we see that the sides crossed the road stretch dizzy to a height. completely sixty feet. This, we recall from our aerial survey, means outer glaciation of about forty feet; since the evaporating ravine we saw from the plane was at the top of a rock mound that was about twenty feet tall, the, somewhat sheltered for three quarters of its circumference by the large arch walls of the higher rows of ruins. According to the statues, the original tower had stood in the middle of a very wide round square; and it was probably 500 or 600 feet tall, with horizontal disc tiers near the top, and rows of needle-like towers along the top edge. Most of the brick pairs have obviously been toppled to the outside rather than into — auspicious events, because otherwise, the road might be destroyed and the entire inside choked. As it was, the road showed a miserable blow; while it was suffocated in such a way that all the arches on the bottom seemed to have just been half cleaned.

We only needed a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route that the other people were using to get down, he said, and that this would have been a logical route for our own ascent despite the long paper trail we left elsewhere. The mouth of the tower was not far from the foothills and our planes were waiting for it rather than the large multi-storey buildings we entered, and any further sub-glacial exploration we may undertake on this journey will be located in this general area. Surprisingly, we are still thinking about the possibility of the next trip — even after everything we saw and guessed. Then as we took a careful path over the rubble of the large floor, came the scene that temporarily excluded all other problems.