The Mountains Of Madness
CHAPTER XII (Part 1)

Danforth and I have memories of emerging into the great sculptural hemisphere and of threading our back footprints through the Cyclopean halls and corridors of the dead city; yet these are pure fragments that do not involve memory of will, detail, or physical activity. It is as if we are drifting in a vague or dimensional world with no time, cause and effect, or orientation. The half-day gray glow of the vast circular space somewhat made us aware; but we did not approach the cached sledges or look again at the poor Gedney and the dog. They have a strange and gigantic mausoleum, and I hope the end of the planet will find them still undisturbed.

While struggling up the colossal spiral ramp, we first felt the terrible fatigue and short breaths produced by our race through the thin highland air; but even the fear of destruction cannot stop us from reaching the normal outer world of the sun and sky. There is something vaguely in keeping with our departure from that buried age; for when we step breathlessly onto the sixty-foot-high primal stone cylinder, it is, we catch a glimpse beside our continuous procession of heroic statues in early techniques and without race dead race — farewells from the Old Ones, written fifty million years ago.

Finally with a scramble over, we found ourselves in a huge pile of blocks; with curved walls of higher rocks looming to the west, we found ourselves in a huge pile of blocks, and the tops of the great mountains mused beyond the more ruined structure to the east. The low-sun of midnight antarctica peeked red from the southern horizon through a crack in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and death of the nightmare city seemed more conspicuous compared to things that were relatively known and accustomed as features of the polar landscape. The sky above was a pile of tenuous and opalescent ice vapor, and a chill gripped our vitality. Wearyly put down the bag of clothes we instinctively held throughout our desperate flight, we undone our heavy clothing as it stumbled up and down into the mound of earth and walked through an old stone maze to the foothills where our plane was waiting. About what has made us escape from the secret darkness of the earth and the ancient abyss we say nothing.

In less than a quarter of an hour, we have found a steep slope at the foot of the hill — possible ancient terraces — where we descended, we have, and could see the dark part of our great plane amid the sparse ruins on the uphill slopes ahead. Half way uphill towards our destination, we paused for a moment to inhale a breath, and turning to look again at the fantastic interwoven palaeogean of the extraordinary stone forms below us — is once again elaborated mystically towards the unknown west. As we did so, we saw that the sky outside had lost the morning mist; the agitated ice-vapors moved up to the top, place their lines of ridicule seem at the point of getting into a strange pattern that they are worried about to make something definite or conclusive.

If the sculptural maps and drawings in the pre-human city were truly told, this faint purple mountain range would not be far from 300 miles away; yet nothing lacking in sharpness was the dim essence of their fairies sticking out over the desolate and snowy edges, just as the jagged edges of the monstrous alien planet would rise into the unfamiliar sky. Their height, therefore, is, it must have been amazing compared to all the known comparisons — brings them into the tenuous atmospheric strata inhabited by gaseous ghosts like the rash aviators barely live to whisper after a fall that inexplicable. See them, see them, I uneasily thought of certain sculptural clues about what the great river had gone through that had passed into the city from their cursed slopes — and wondered how resourceful and how great of a folly which was in the fear of the Old Men who carved it so much quietly. I remember how their northern tip had to come near the shore in Queen Mary Land, where even at that time Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition must have worked less than a thousand miles away; and hope that no evil fate will give Sir Douglas and his people a glimpse of what may exist beyond the protected coastal areas. Such thoughts formed the size of my overly tense condition at the time — and Danforth looked worse.

But long before we passed through the massive, star-shaped wreckage and reached our plane, our fears had been diverted to a smaller but wide enough range whose re-intersections lay ahead of us. From the foothills of this black and broken slope crimped up eastward, once again reminiscent of the strange paintings of Nicholas Roerich from Asia; and when we think of the damned honeycomb inside them, and of the eerie amorphous entities that might drive their foetidly wriggling way even to the very top hollow peak, he said, we could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by the mouth of a cave into that suggestive sky where the wind makes a sound like a pipe of evil music in various. To make things worse, though, we saw traces of different local fog around some peaks - like poor Lake had to do when he made his initial mistake about volcanism - and thought about shivering that kind of fog from him we had just fled; that, and from the abyss of blasphemy, from which all the steam came.