[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
At the Mountains of Madness
1
At the Mountains of Madness
by H. P. Lovecraft
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.
by H. P. Lovecraft
2
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 geologist, 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;
by H. P. Lovecraft
3
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 Thorfinnssen, 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 - table-like 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.
by H. P. Lovecraft
4
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 poignant 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 press reports to the Arkham Advertiser's powerful wireless station on Kingsport
Head, Massachusetts. We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer; but if this proved
impossible, we would winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice for
another summer's supplies.
I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early work: of our ascent of Mt.
Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which
Pabodie's apparatus accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our provisional test of the small
ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final
assembling of five huge aeroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party - twenty men and
fifty-five Alaskan sledge dogs - was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no really
destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most part, the thermometer varied between zero and 20¡ or
25¡ above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to rigors of this sort. The barrier
camp was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite, and other
supplies.
Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material, the fifth being left with a pilot and
two men from the ships at the storage cache to form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our
exploring planes were lost. Later, when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we would employ
one or two in a shuttle transportation service between this cache and another permanent base on the great
plateau from six hundred to seven hundred miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. Despite the almost
unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests that pour down from the plateau, we determined to
dispense with intermediate bases, taking our chances in the interest of economy and probable efficiency.
by H. P. Lovecraft
5
Wireless reports have spoken of the breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop flight of our squadron on November 21st
over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on the west, and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound
of our engines. Wind troubled us only moderately, and our radio compasses helped us through the one opaque
fog we encountered. When the vast rise loomed ahead, between Latitudes 83¡ and 84¡, we knew we had
reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was now giving
place to a frowning and mountainous coast line. At last we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of
the ultimate south. Even as we realized it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up
to its height of almost fifteen thousand feet.
The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude 86¡ 7', East Longitude 174¡
23', and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by our
sledge trips and short aeroplane flights, are matters of history; as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of Mt.
Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate students - Gedney and Carroll - on December 13 - 15. We were
some eight thousand, five hundred feet above sea-level, and when experimental drillings revealed solid
ground only twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the
small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer
had ever thought of securing mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus
obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous, with the great bulk of the continent to the
west, but somewhat different from the parts lying eastward below South America - which we then thought to
form a separate and smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell
Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis.
In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed their nature, we found some highly
interesting fossil markings and fragments; notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such mollusks as
linguellae and gastropods - all of which seemed of real significance in connection with the region's primordial
history. There was also a queer triangular, striated marking, about a foot in greatest diameter, which Lake
pieced together from three fragments of slate brought up from a deep-blasted aperture. These fragments came
from a point to the westward, near the Queen Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their
curious marking unusually puzzling and provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some
of the ripple effects reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks. Since slate is no more than a metamorphic
formation into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself produces odd distorting
effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression.
On January 6th, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, the other six students, and myself flew directly over the south
pole in two of the great planes, being forced down once by a sudden high wind, which, fortunately, did not
develop into a typical storm. This was, as the papers have stated, one of several observation flights, during
others of which we tried to discern new topographical features in areas unreached by previous explorers. Our
early flights were disappointing in this latter respect, though they afforded us some magnificent examples of
the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had given us some
brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world
would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under
the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying owing to the
tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark
the junction of the two.
At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying five hundred miles eastward with all four
exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point which would probably be on the smaller
continental division, as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable
for purposes of comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent - lime juice well offsetting the steady
diet of tinned and salted food, and temperatures generally above zero enabling us to do without our thickest
furs. It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we might be able to conclude work by March and avoid
a tedious wintering through the long antarctic night. Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]