H.P. Lovecraft. At the Mountains of Madness
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
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; 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
62DEG 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 67DEG, East
Longitude 175DEG 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 77DEG 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 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 20DEG or 25DEG 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.
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 83DEG and 84DEG, 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 86DEG 7', East Longitude 174DEG 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
