HP Lovecraft - 48 Books And Short ...

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H. P. Lovecraft
48 Stories
At the Mountains of Madness
By H. P. Lovecraft
Written Feb-22 Mar 1931
Published February-April 1936 in Astounding Stories, Vol. 16, No. 6 (February
1936), p. 8-32; Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 1936), p. 125-55; Vol. 17, No. 2 (April
1936), p. 132-50.
I
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice
without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for
opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic - with its vast fossil hunt
and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more
reluctant because my warning may be in vain.
Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I
suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing
left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in
my favor, for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted
because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink
drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures, notwithstanding a
strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.
In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific
leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh
my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain
primordial and highly baffling myth cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient
influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and
over-ambitious program in the region of those mountains of madness. It is an
unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates,
connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an
impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are
concerned.
It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in
the fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a ge ologist, my object in
leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing
deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic
continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Professor Frank H. Pabodie
of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field
than this, but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at
different points along previously explored paths would bring to light materials
of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection.
Pabodie’s drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was
unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the
ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock
drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel
head, jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting
paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional piping for bores
five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep all formed, with needed
accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry. This was
made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects
were fashioned. Four large Dornier aeroplanes, designed especially for the
tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added
fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport
our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to
various suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs
would serve us.
We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season - or longer, if
absolutely necessary - would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and
on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by
Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by
aeroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance,
we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material-especially in
the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had
previously been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety
of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life history of this bleak
realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the
earth’s past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical,
with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna,
arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter
of common information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety,
accuracy, and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we
would enlarge the aperture by blasting, in order to get specimens of suitable
size and condition.
Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper
soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed, or nearly exposed, land surfaces -
these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile
thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels. We could not afford to waste
drilling the depth of any considerable amount of mere glaciation, though Pabodie
had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in thick clusters of borings
and melting off limited areas of ice with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo.
It is this plan - which we could not put into effect except experimentally on an
expedition such as ours - that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes
to follow, despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the
antarctic.
The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless
reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later
articles of Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four men from the University -
Pabodie, Lake of the biology department, Atwood of the physics department - also
a meteorologist - and myself, representing geology and having nominal command -
besides sixteen assistants: seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine
skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aeroplane pilots, all
but two of whom were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood
navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition,
of course, our two ships - wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions and
having auxiliary steam - were fully manned.
The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions,
financed the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough, despite
the absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and
unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our
ships were loaded. We were marvelously well-equipped for our specific purposes,
and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp
construction we profited by the excellent example of our many recent and
exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of
these predecessors which made our own expedition - ample though it was - so
little noticed by the world at large.
As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd, 1930,
taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and
stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final
supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before,
hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains - J. B. Douglas, commanding the
brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorflnnssen,
commanding the barque Miskatonic - both veteran whalers in antarctic waters.
As we left the inhabited world behind, the sun sank lower and lower in the
north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62°
South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs - tablelike objects with vertical
sides - and just before reaching the antarctic circle, which we crossed on
October 20th with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably troubled
with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long
voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigors to
come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly;
these including a strikingly vivid mirage - the first I had ever seen - in which
distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.
Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly
packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175° On the
morning of October 26th a strong land blink appeared on the south, and before
noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and
snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At
last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and its
cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range
discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail
down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of
McMurdo Sound, at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9'.
The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks of
mystery loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or
the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish
rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed
granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of
the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of
a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range,
and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and
even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and
disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and
more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in
the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry,
later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college
library.
On the 7th of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily
lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts.
Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry
Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low, white line of the
great ice barrier, rising perpendicularly to a height of two hundred feet like
the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. In the
afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking
Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up some twelve thousand, seven hundred feet
against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama, while
beyond it rose the white, ghostlike height of Mt. Terror, ten thousand, nine
hundred feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano.
Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate
assistants - a brilliant young fellow named Danforth - pointed out what looked
like lava on the snowy slope, remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840,
had undoubtedly been the source of Poe’s image when he wrote seven years later:
- the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole -
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.
Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of
Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe’s only long
story - the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore,
and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins
squawked and flapped their fins, while many fat seals were visible on the water,
swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after
midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the
ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement.
Our sensations on first treading Antarctic soil were poiguant and complex, even
though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had
preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano’s slope was only a
provisional one, headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham. We landed all our
drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks,
experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and aerial, aeroplane
parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless outfits -
besides those in the planes - capable of communicating with the Arkham’s large
outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be likely to
visit. The ship’s outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey
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