At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft - Chapter 8

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Episode Transcript

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Chapter eight about the Mountains of Madnessby H. P. Lovecraft. This
LibriVox recordings in the public domain readby Ben Tucker, Chapter eight. Naturally,
Danforth and I studied with a specialinterest, in a peculiarly personal sense
of awe, everything pertaining to theimmediate district in which we were. Of

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this local material there was naturally avast abundance, and on the tangled ground
level of the city we were luckyenough to find a house of very late
date, whose walls, though somewhatdamaged by neighboring rift, contained sculptures of
decadent workmanship, carrying the story ofthe region much beyond the period of the
Pliocene map, whence we derived ourlast general glimpse of the pre human world.

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This was the last place we examinedin detail, since what we found
there gave us a fresh immediate objective. Certainly, we were in one of
the strangest, weirdest, and mostterrible of all the corners of Earth's globe.
Of all existing lands, it wasinfinitely the most ancient, and the
conviction grew upon us that this hideousupland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau

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of lng, which even the madauthor of the Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss.
The Great Mountain Chain was tremendously long, starting as a low range at
lootpold Land on the coast of WettalSea and virtually crossing the entire continent.
The really high part stretched in amighty arc from about latitude eighty two degrees

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east longitude sixty degrees to latitude seventydegrees east longitude one fifteen degrees, with
its concave side toward our camp,and its seaward end in the region of
that long ice locked coast, whosehills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mosson at
the Antarctic Circle. Yet even moremonstrous exaggerations of nature seemed disturbingly close at

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hand. I have said that thesepeaks are higher than the Himalays, but
the sculptures forbid me to say thatthey are Earth's highest. That ground honors
beyond doubt reserve for something which halfthe sculptures hesitated to record at all,
whilst others approached it with the obviousrepugnance. In trepidation. It seems that
there was one part of the ancientland, the first part that ever rose

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from the waters, after the Earthhad flung off the moon and the old
ones had seeped down from the stars, which had come to be shunned as
vaguely and namelessly evil cities built therehad crumbled before their time and had been
found suddenly deserted. Then, whenthe first great earth buckling had convulsed the
region in the Comanchean Age, afrightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up

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amidst the most appalling din and chaos, and Earth had received her loftiest and
most terrible mountains. If the scaleof the carvings was correct, these abhorred
things must have been much over fortythousand feet high, radically vaster than even
the shocking mountains of madness we hadcrossed. They extended. It appeared from
about latitude seventy seven degrees east longitudedegrees to latitude seventy degrees east longitude one

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hundred degrees, less than three hundredmiles away from the dead city, so
that we would have spied their dreadedsummits in the dim western distance, had
it not been for that vague opalescenthaze. Their northern end must likewise be
visible from the long Antarctic circle coastline at Queen mary Land. Some of
the old ones in the decadent dayshad made strange prayers to those mountains,

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but none ever went near them,or dared to guess what lay beyond.
No human eye had ever seen them. And as I studied the emotions conveyed
in the carvings, I prayed thatnone ever might There are protecting hills along
the coast beyond them, Queen maryand Kaiser Wilhelm Lands, And I think
heaven no one has been able toland and climb those hills. I am

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not as skeptical about old tales andfears as I used to be, and
I do not laugh now at thepre human sculptor's notion that lightning paused meaningfully
now and then at each of thebrooding crests, and that an unexplained glow
shown from one of those terrible pinnaclesall through the long polar night. There
might be a very real and verymonstrous meaning in the old niconic whispers about

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cut off in the cold waste.But the terraining close at hand was hardly
less strange, even if less namelesslyaccursed. Soon after the founding of the
city, the great Mountain Range becamethe seat of the principal temples, and
many carvings showed what grotesque and fantastictowers had pierced the sky where now we

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saw only the curiously clinging cubes andramparts. In the course of ages,
the caves had appeared and had beenshaped into adjuncts of the temples. With
the advance of still later epochs,all the limestone vanes of the region were
hollowed out by ground waters, sothat the mountains, the foothills, and
the plains below them were a veritablenetwork of connected caverns and galleries. Many

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graphic sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the
Stygian s Sea that lurked at Earth'sbowels. This vast, nighted gulf had
undoubtedly been worn by the great Riverwhich flowed down from the nameless and horrible
westward mountains, and which had formerlyturned at the base of the Old One's

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Range, and flowed beside that chaininto the Indian Ocean between Bud and Totton
Lands on Wilke's coastline. Little bylittle it had eaten away the limestone hill
base at its turning till at lastits sapping currents reached the caverns of the
ground waters and joined with them indigging a deeper abyss. Finally, its
whole bulk emptied into the hollow hillsand left the old bed toward the ocean

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dry. Much of the later city, as we now found it, had
been built over that former bed.The old ones, understanding what had happened,
and exercising their always keen artistic scents, had carved into ornate pylons those
headlands of the foothills where the greatstream began its descent into eternal darkness.
This river, once crossed by scoresof noble stone bridges, was plainly the

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one whose extinct course we had seenin our aeroplane survey. Its position in
different carvings of the city helped usto orient ourselves to the scene as it
had been at various stages of theregion's age long Eon Dead history, so
that we were able to sketch ahasty but careful map of the salient features,
squares, important buildings, and thelike for guidance and further explorations.

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We could soon reconstruct and fancy thewhole stupendous thing as it was a million
or ten million, or fifty millionyears ago. For the sculptures told us
exactly what the buildings and mountains andsquares and suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant
tertiary vegetation had looked like. Itmust have had a marvelous and mystic beauty.
And as I thought of it,I almost forgot the clammy sense of

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sinister oppression with which the cities inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness
and glacial twilight had choked and weighedon my spirit. Yet according to certain
carvings, the denizens of that cityhad themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror.
For there was a somber and recurrenttype of scene in which the old

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ones were shown in the act ofrecoiling affrightedly from some object never allowed to
appear in the design found in theGreat River, and indicated as having been
washed down through waving vine draped cycadforests from those horrible westward mountains. It
was only in the one late builthouse with the decadent carvings that we obtained

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any foreshadowing of the final calamity leadingto the city's desertion. Undoubtedly there must
have been many sculptures of the sameage elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened
energies and aspirations of a stressful anduncertain period. Indeed, very certain evidence
of the existence of others came tous shortly afterward. But this was the

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first and only set we directly encountered. We meant to look farther later or
on, but as I have said, immediate conditions dictated another present objective.
There would though have been a limit, for after all, hope of a
long future occupancy of the place hadperished. Among the old ones, there
could not have been but a completecessation of mural decoration. The ultimate below,

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of course, was the coming ofthe Great Cold, which once held
most of the Earth and thrall,and which has never departed from the ill
fated Poles, The great Cold thatat the world's other extremity put an end
to the fabled lands of Lomar andHyperborea. Just when this tendency began in
the Antarctic, it would be hardto say in terms of exact years.

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Nowadays, we set the beginning ofthe general glacial periods at a distance of
about five hundred thousand years from thepresent, but at the poles the terrible
scourge must have commenced much earlier.All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork, but
it is quite likely that the decadentsculptures were made considerably less than a million
years ago, and that the actualdesertion of this city was complete long before

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the conventional opening of the Pleistocene fivehundred thousand years ago. As reckoned in
terms of the Earth's whole surface.In the decadent sculptures, there were signs
of thinner vegetation everywhere, and ofa decreased country life on the part of
the old ones. Heating devices wereshown in the houses, and winter travelers
were repressed as muffled and protective fabrics. Then we saw a series of cartouches,

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the continuous band arrangement being frequently interruptedin these lake carvings, depicting a
constant growing migration to the nearest refugesof greater warmth, some fleeting to cities
under the sea off the faraway coast, and some clambering down through networks of
limestone caverns and the hollow hills tothe neighboring Black Abyss of Subterrane Waters.

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In the end, it seems tohave been the neighboring Abyss which received the
greatest colonization. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional sacredness
of this especial region, but mayhave been more inclusively determined by the opportunities
it gave for continuing the use ofthe great temples on the Honeycombed mountains,
and for retaining the vast land cityas a place of summer residence and base

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of communication with various mines. Thelinkage of old and new abodes was made
more effective by means of several gratingsand improvements along the connecting routes, including
the chiseling of numerous direct tunnels fromthe ancient metropolis to the Black Abyss,
sharply down pointing tunnels whose mouths wecarefully drew. According to our most thoughtful

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estimates on the guide map we werecompiling, it was obvious that at least
two of these tunnels lay within areasonable exploring distance of where we were,
both being on the mountain word edgeof the city, one less than a
quarter mile toward the ancient river course, and the other perhaps twice that distance
in the opposite direction. The Abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of
dry land at certain places. Butthe Old Ones built their new city underwater,

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no doubt because of its greater certaintyof uniform warmth. The depth of
the Hidden Sea appears to have beenvery great, so that the Earth's internal
heat could ensure its habitability for anindefinite period. The beings seemed to have
had no trouble in adapting themselves topart time and eventually, of course,
whole time residence underwater, since theyhad never allowed their gill systems to atrophy.

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There were many sculptures which showed howthey had always frequently visited their submarine
kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they hadhabitually bathed on the deep bottom of their
great river. The darkness of innerEarth could likewise have been no deterrent to
erase accustomed to long Antarctic nights.Decadent, though their style undoubtedly was,
these latest carvings had a truly epicquality where they told of the building of

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the new city in the cavern sea. The old Ones had gone about it
scientifically, quarrying insoluble rocks from theheart of the honeycombed mountains, and employing
expert workers from the nearest submarine cityto perform the construction according to the best
methods. These workers brought with themall that was necessary to establish the new
venture showgoth tissue from which to breedstone lifters and subsequent beasts of burden for

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the cavern city, and other protoplasmicmatter to mold into phosphorescent organisms for lighting
purposes. At last, a mightymetropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian
sea, its architecture much like thatof the city above, and its workmanship
displaying relatively little decadence because of theprecise mathematical element inherent in building operations.

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The newly bred showgoths grew to enormoussize and singular intelligence, and were represented
as taking and executing orders with marvelousquickness. They seemed to converse with the
old ones by mimicking their voices asort of musical piping over a wide range
if poor Lake's dissection had indicated right, and to work more from spoken commands

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than from hypnotic suggestions as in earliertimes. They were, however, kept
in admirable control. The phosphorescent organismssupplied light with vast effectiveness, and doubtless
atoned for the loss of the familiarpolar auroras of the outer world. Night
art and decoration were pursued, thoughof course with a certain decadence. The

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Old Ones seemed to realize this fallingoff themselves, and in many cases anticipated
the policy of Constantine the Great bytransplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from
their land city, just as theemperor, in a similar age of decline,
stripped Greece and Asia of their finestart to give his new Byzantine capital
greater splendors than its own people couldcreate. That the transfer of sculptured blocks

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had not been more extensive was doubtlessowing to the fact that the land city
was not at first wholly abandoned.By the time total abandonment did occur,
and it surely must have occurred beforethe Polar Polictocene was far advanced, the
Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied withtheir deconant art, or it ceased to
recognize the superior merit of the oldercarvings. At any rate, that eon

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silent ruins around us had certainly undergoneno wholesale sculptural denundation. Though all the
best separate statues, like other movables, had been taken away. The decadent
cartouches and dattos telling this story were, as I have said, the latest
we could find in our limited search. They left us with a picture of
the Old Ones shuttling back and forthbetwixt the land city in summer and the

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sea cavern city in winter, andsometimes trading with the sea bottomed cities off
the Antarctic coast. By this timethe ultimate doom of the land city must
have been recognized, for the sculpturesshowed many signs of the colds, malign
encroachments. Vegetation was declining, andthe terrible snows of the winter no longer
melted completely even in midsummer. TheSaurian livestock were nearly all dead, and

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the mammals were standing it none toowell to keep on with the work of
the upper world. It had becomenecessary to adapt some of the amorphous and
curiously cold resistant show goths to landlife, a thing the Old Ones had
formerly been reluctant to do. TheGreat River, now lifeless in the upper
Sea, had lost most of itsdenizens except the seals and whales. All

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the birds had flown away, saveonly the great grotesque penguins. What had
happened afterward? We could only guesshow long had the new sea cavern city
survived. Was it still down therea stony corpse and eternal blackness? Had
the subterranean waters frozen at last?To what fate had the ocean bottomed cities
of the outer world been delivered,Had any of the old ones shifted north

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ahead of the creeping ice cap?Existing geology shows no trace of their presence.
Had the frightful migo been still amenace in the outer land world of
the north. Could one be sureof what min or might not linger even
to this day in the lightless andunplumbed abysses of Earth's deepest waters. Those
things had seemingly been able to withstandany amount of pressure, and men of

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the sea had fished up curious objectsat times, And as the killer whale
theory really explained the savage and mysteriousscars on Antarctic seals noted a generation ago
by Borchgrovink, the specimens found byPoor Lake did not enter into these guesses,
for their geologic setting proved them tohave lived at what must have been
a very early date in the landcity's history. They were, according to

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their location, certainly not less thanthirty million years old, and we reflected
that in their day, the seacavern city, and indeed the cavern itself,
had no existence. They would haveremembered an older scene, with lush,
tertiary vegetation everywhere, a younger landcity of flourishing arts around them,
and a great river sweeping northward alongthe base of the mighty mountains toward a

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faraway tropic ocean. And yet wecould not help thinking about these specimens,
especially about the eight perfect ones thatwere missing from Lake's hideously ravaged camp.
There was something abnormal about that wholebusiness, the strange things we had tried
so hard to lay to somebody's madness, those frightful graves, the mountain nature

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of the missing material Gedney, theunearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities, and
the queer of vital freaks. Thesculptures now showed the race to have.
Danforth and I had seen a gooddeal in the last few hours, and
were prepared to believe and keep silentabout many appalling and incredible secrets of primal

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nature. End of chapter eight,