The Mountains Of Madness
Part 2

Everything was fine with the plane, and we awkwardly transported our heavy flying feathers. Danforth turned the engine on without difficulty, and we drove very smoothly over the nightmare city. Below us, ancient Cyclopean bricks spread out as they did when we first saw it — was so short, yet so long, it was, some time ago — and we started getting up and turning to test the wind to cross through the gap. At a very high level there must have been a great disturbance, because the zenith dust clouds did all sorts of fantastic things; but at 24,000 feet, the height we needed to pass, he said, we found navigation quite practical. As we got closer to the overhanging summit, the strange pipe of wind again became real, and I could see Danforth's hand trembling in control. Despite my rank of amateur, I thought at the time that I might be a better navigator than him in doing the dangerous crossroads between peaks; and when I made the move to change seats and take over her duties, she didn't protest. I tried to keep all my skills and self-possession about me, and gazed at the sector of the rosy sky further between the walls of the crevice - resolutely refusing to notice the puff of mountain steam, and, and hope that I have Ear candles that stop like those Ulysses off the Sirens coast to keep that annoying wind pipe out of my consciousness.

But Danforth, freed from his driving and entering a dangerous field, could not keep quiet. I felt it spinning and writhing as he looked back at the receding city, in front of the cavern-filled, cube-storied peaks, beside in the gloomy sea of snowy hills, he said, the foothills pounded the fortress, and upwards in the distance, with strange, cloudy clouds, the sky. That was when, just as I was trying to steer safely through the gap, that his crazy screams brought us so close to disaster by smashing my strong hold on myself and making me fumble uncontrollably with control for a moment. A second later my resolve won and we managed to cross safely — but I was worried Danforth would never be the same again.

I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what the last horror was that made him shout so crazily — a horror that, I feel confident, is especially responsible for his current annoyance. We had pieces of conversation screaming over windpipes and machines buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly towards the camp, but it mostly has to do with the secrecy promises we have made as we prepare to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we have agreed, not for those who know and discuss lightly — and I will not talk about them now, but for the purposes of stopping the Starkweather-Moore Expedition, he said, and others, at any cost. It is very important, for the peace and salvation of mankind, that some dark and dead corners of the earth and unexplored depths are left alone; he said; lest sleep disorders awaken to a life that is reawakening, and the nightmares that survive wriggle and break out of their black nest into newer and wider conquests.

All Danforth has ever shown is that the last horror is a mirage. He stated, it is nothing related to the cube and the echoing caverns, like the crazy honey mountains we traverse; but a fantastic daemonic glimpse, he said, among the swirling clouds of zenith, about what was behind the other violet mountains in the west that the Old Men had shunned and feared. It is quite possible that it was a mere delusion born from previous pressures that we had passed through, and about the actual though unrecognized mirage of the dead transmontane town that was experienced near Lake's camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he still suffered for it.

He sometimes whispers disjointed and irresponsible things about "black holes", "carved rims", "proto-shoggoths", "windowless solids with five dimensions", "nameless cylinder", "nameless old tree", "older pharos", "Yog-Sothoth", "primal white jelly", "color out of space", "wings", "eyes in darkness", "the moon ladder", "original, eternal, eternal", and other strange conceptions; but when he was fully himself, he rejected all these and attributed them to his curious and terrible reading of the previous years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who dare read a worm-filled copy of the Necronomicon stored in keys and keys in the campus library.

At that moment his screams were limited to the repetition of one crazy word from all too obvious sources:

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"