At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft - Chapter 6

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Episode Transcript

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Chapter six of At the Mountains ofMadness by H. P. Lovecraft.
This LibriVox recording is in the publicdomain. Read by Bin Tucker, Chapter
six. It would be cumbrus togive a detailed, consecutive account of our
wanderings inside that cavernous, eon deadhoneycomb of primal masonry, that monstrous layer

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of elder secrets, which now echoedfor the first time after uncounted epochs to
the tread of human feet. Thisis especially true because so much of the
horrible drama and revelation came from amere study of the omnipresent mural carvings.
Our flashlight photographs of those carvings willdo much toward proving the truth of what
we are now disclosing. And itis lamentable that we had not a larger

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film supply with us. As itwas, we made crude notebook sketches of
certain salient features after all our filmswere used up. The building which we
had entered was one of great sizeand elaborateness, and gave us an impressive
notion of the architecture of that namelessgeologic past. The inner partitions were less
massive than the outer walls, buton the lower levels were excellently preserved.

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Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular differencesin floor levels, characterized the entire arrangement,
and we should certainly have been lostat the very outset, but for
the trail of torn paper left behindus. We decided to explore the more
decrepit upper parts first of all,hence climbing aloft in the maze for a
distance of some one hundred feet towhere the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily

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and ruinously opened the polar sky.Ascent was effected over the steep transversely ribbed
stone ramps or inclined planes, whicheverywhere served in liew of stairs. The
rooms we encountered were of all imaginableshapes and proportions, ranging from five pointed
stars to triangles and perfect cubes.It might be safe to say that their

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general average was about thirty by thirtyfeet in floor area and twenty feet in
height, though many larger apartments existed. After thoroughly examining the upper regions and
the glacial level, we ascended storyby story into the submerged part, where
indeed we soon saw we were ina continuous maze of connected chambers and passages,
probably leading over unlimited areas outside thisparticular building. The Cyclopean massiveness and

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giganticism of everything about us became curiouslyoppressive, and there was something vaguely but
deeply unhuman in all the contours,dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional
nuances of the blasphemously archaic stone work. We soon realized from what the carvings
revealed that this monstrous city was manymillion years old. We cannot yet explain

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the engineering principles used in the anomalousbalancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses,
though the function of the arch wasclearly much relied on The rooms we
visited were wholly bare of all portablecontents, a circumstance which sustained our belief
in the city's deliberate desertion. Theprime decorative feature was the almost universal system

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of mural sculpture, which tended torun in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide
and ranged from floor to ceiling,in alternation with bands of equal width given
over to geometrical arabesques. There wereexceptions to this rule of arrangement, but
its preponderance was overwhelming. Often,however, a series of smooth carthouches containing

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oddly patterned groups of dots would besunk along one of the Arabesque bands.
The technique we soon saw was mature, accomplished, and esthetically evolved to the
highest degree of civilized mastery, thoughutterly alien in every detail to any known
art tradition of the human race.In delicacy of execution, no sculpture I

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have ever seen could approach it.The minutest details of elaborate vegetation or of
animal life were rendered with astonishing vividnessdespite the bold scale of the carvings.
Whilst the conventional designs were marvels ofskillful intricacy, the Arabesques displayed a profound
use of mathematical principles and were madeup of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based

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on the quantity of five. Thepictorial bands followed a highly formalized tradition and
involved a peculiar treatment of perspective,but had an artistic force that moved us
profoundly, notwithstanding the intervening gulf ofvast geologic periods. Their method of design
hinged on a singular juxtaposition of thecross section with two dimensional silhouette, and

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embodied in analytical psychology beyond that ofany known race of antiquity. It is
useless to try to compare this artwith any represented in our museums. Those
who see our photographs will probably findits closest analog in certain grotesque conceptions of
the most daring futurists. The Arabesquetracery consisted altogether of depressed lines, whose

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depth on unweathered walls varied from oneto two inches. When cartouches with dot
groups appeared, evidently as inscriptions insome unknown and primordial language in alphabet,
the depression of the smooth surface wasperhaps an inch and a half and of
the dots perhaps a half inch more. The pictorial bands were in counter sunk
low relief, their background being depressedabout two inches from the original wall surface,

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and some specimens marks of a formercoloration could be detected, though for
the most part the untold eons haddisintegrated and banished any pigments which may have
been applied. The more one studiedthe marvelous technique, the more one admired
the things beneath their strict conventionalization,one could grasp the minute and accurate observation
and graphic skill of the artists,And indeed the very conventions themselves served to

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symbolize and accentuate the real essence orvital differentiation of every object delineated. We
felt, too, that besides theserecognizable excellences, there were others lurking beyond
the reach of our perceptions. Certaintouches here and there gave vague hints of
latent symbols and stimuli which another mentaland emotional background and a fuller or different

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sensory equipment might have made of profoundand poignant significance to us. The subject
matter of the sculptures obviously came fromthe life of the vanished epoch of their
creation, and contained a large proportionof evident history. It is this abnormal
historic mindedness of the primal race,a chance circumstance, operating through coincidence miraculously

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in our favor, which made thecarvings so awesomely informative to us, and
which caused us to place their photographyand transcription above all other considerations. In
certain rooms, the dominant arrangement wasvaried by the presence of maps, astronomical
charts and other scientific designs on anenlarged scale, these things giving a naive

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and terrible corroboration to what we gatheredfrom the toial friezes and dattos, and
hinting at what the whole revealed.I can only hope that my account will
not arouse a curiosity greater than sayingcaution on the part of those who believe
me at all. It would betragic if any were to be allured to
that realm of death and horror bythe very warning meant to discourage them.

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Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windowsand massive twelve foot doorways, both now
and then, retaining the petrified woodenplanks elaborately carved and polished. Of the
actual shutters and doors, all metalfixtures had long ago vanished, but some
of the doors remained in place andhad to be forced aside as we progressed

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from room to room. Window frameswith odd transparent panes, mostly elliptical,
survived here and there, though inno considerable quantity. There were also frequent
niches of great magnitude, generally emptybut once in a while containing some bizarre
object carved from green soapstone, whichwas either broken or perhaps held to in

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fear ear to warrant removal. Otherapertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical facilities,
heating, lighting, and the likeof a sort suggested in many of
the carvings. Ceilings tended to beplain, but had sometimes been inlaid with
green soapstone or other tiles, mostlyfallen now. Floors were also paved with

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such tiles, though plain stone workpredominated. As I have said, all
furniture and other movables were absent,but the sculptures gave a clear idea of
the strange devices which had once filledthese tomb like echoing rooms above the glacial
sheet. The floors were generally thickwith detritus, litter and debris, but
farther down this condition decreased, andsome of the lower chambers and corridors there

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was little more than gritty dust orancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an
uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness.Of course, where rifts or collapses had
occurred, the lower levels were aslittered as the upper one. A central
court, as in other structures wehad seen from the air saved the inner
regions from total darkness, so thatwe seldom had to use our electric torches

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in the upper rooms, except whenstudying sculpture details. Below the ice cap.
However, the twilight deepened, andin many parts of the tangled ground
level there was an approach to absoluteblackness. To form even a rudimentary idea
of our thoughts and feelings as wepenetrated this eon silent maze of unhuman masonry,
one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering chaosof fugitive moods, memories, and

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impressions. The sheer, appalling antiquity, and lethal desolation of the place were
enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person. But added to these elements were the
recent unexplained horror at the camp andthe revelations all too soon affected by the
terrible mural sculptures around us. Themoment we came upon a perfect section of

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carving where no ambiguity of interpretation couldexist took only a brief study to give
us the hideous truth, a truthwhich it would be naive to claim Danforth
and I had not independently suspected before, though we had carefully refrained from even
hinting it to each other. Therecould now be no further merciful doubt about

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the nature of the beings which hadbuilt and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions
of years ago, when man's ancestorswere primitive, archaic mammals, and vast
dinosaurs roamed the tropical steps of Europeand Asia. We had previously clung to
a desperate alternative and insisted each tohimself that the omnipresence of the five pointed

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motif meant only some cultural or religiousexaltation of the archaean natural object which had
so patently embodied the quality of fivepointedness, as the decorative motifs of Minoan
crete exalted the sacred bull, thoseof Egypt the Scarabaeus, those of Rome
the wolf and the eagle, andthose of various savage tribe some chosen totem

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animal. But this lone refuge wasnow stripped from us, and we were
forced to face definitely the reason shakingrealization which the reader of these pages has
doubtless long ago anticipated. I canscarcely bear to write it down in black
and white even now, but perhapsthat will not be necessary. The things
once rearing and dwelling in this frightfulmasonry. In the age of dinosaurs were

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not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless
objects. But the builders of thiscity were wise and old, and had
left certain traces and rocks even thenlaid down well nigh a thousand million years,
rocks laid down before the true lifeof Earth had advanced beyond plastic groups

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of cells. Rocks laid down beforethe true life of Earth had existed at
all. They were the makers andenslavers of that life, and above all
doubt the originals of the fiendish eldermyths which things like the Narcotic Men,
his Scripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hintabout. They were the great old ones

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that had filtered down from the starswhen Earth was young, the beings whose
substance and alien evolution had shaped andwhose powers were such as this planet had
never bred. And to think thatonly the day before Danforth and I had
actually looked upon fragments of their millenniallyfossilized substance, and that poor Lake and

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his party had seen their complete outlines, it is of course impossible for me
to relate in proper order the stagesby which we picked up what we know
of that monstrous chapter of prehuman life. After the first shock of the certain
revelation, we had to pause awhileto recuperate, and it was fully three
o'clock before we got started on ouractual tour of systematic research. The sculptures

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in the building we entered were ofrelatively late date, perhaps two million years
ago, as checked up by geological, biological and astronomical features, and embodied
in art which would be called decadentin comparison that of specimens we found in
older buildings. After crossing bridges underthe glacial sheet, one edifice hewn from

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the solid rock seemed to go backforty or possibly even fifty million years to
the lower Eocene, were Upper Cretaceous, and contained bas reliefs of an artistry
surpassing anything else, with one tremendousexception that we encountered. That was,
we have since agreed, the oldestdomestic structure we traversed. Were it not

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for the support of those flashlights soonto be made public, I would refrain
from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a madman
of course, the infinitely early partsof the patchwork tale, representing the preterrestrial
life of the star headed beings onother planets and in other galaxies and in
other universes, can readily be interpretedas the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves.

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Yet such parts sometimes involve designs anddiagrams so uncannily close to the latest
findings of mathematics and astrophysics that Iscarcely know what to think. Let others
judge when they see the photographs Ishall publish. Naturally, no one said
of carvings which we encountered told morethan a fraction of any connected story,

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nor did we even begin to comeupon the various stages of that story in
their proper order. Some of thevast rooms were independent units so far as
their designs were concerned, whilst inother cases a continuous chronicle would be carried
through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of the maps and diagrams
were on the walls of a frightfulabyss below even the ancient ground level,

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a cavern perhaps two hundred feet squareand sixty feet high, which had almost
undoubtedly been an educational center of somesort there were many provoking repetitions of the
same material in different rooms and buildings, since certain chapters of experience in certain
summaries or phrases of racial history hadevidently been frits with different decorators or dwellers.

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Sometimes, though variant versions of thesame theme proved useful in settling debatable
points and filling in gaps, Istill wonder that we deduced so much in
the short time at our disposal.Of course, we even now have only
the barest outline, and much ofthat was obtained later on from a study
of the photographs and sketches we made. It may be the effect of this

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later study, the revived memories andvague impressions, acting in conjunction with his
general sensitiveness, and with that finalsupposed horror glimpse, whose essence he will
not reveal even to me, whichhas been the immediate source of Danforth's present
breakdown. But it had to be, for we could not issue our warning
intelligently without the fullest possible information,and the issuance of that warning is a

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prime necessity. Certain lingering influences inthat unknown antarctic world of disordered time and
alien natural law make it imperative thatfurther exploration be discouraged. End of Chapter six