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
