This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely satisfied the men at the camp.We laid our absence of sixteen hours—a longer time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitring, and rock-collecting programme called for—to a long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions; and told truly of our landing on the farther foothills.Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt any of the others into emulating our flight.Had any tried to do that, I would have used every ounce of my persuasion to stop them—and I do not know what Danforth would have done.While we were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson had worked like beavers over Lake’s two best planes; fitting them again for use despite the altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism.
We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old base as soon as possible.Even though indirect, that was the safest way to work toward McMurdo Sound; for a straight-line flight across the most utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-dead continent would involve many additional hazards.Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our tragic decimation and the ruin of our drilling machinery; and the doubts and horrors around us—which we did not reveal—made us wish only to escape from this austral world of desolation and brooding madness as swiftly as we could.
As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without further disasters.All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next day—January 27th—after a swift non-stop flight; and on the 28th we made McMurdo Sound in two laps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the ice-shelf after we had cleared the great plateau.In five days more the Arkham and Miskatonic, with all hands and equipment on board, were shaking clear of the thickening field ice and working up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria Land looming westward against a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the wind’s wails into a wide-ranged musical piping which chilled my soul to the quick.Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us, and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet’s scarce-cooled crust.
Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic exploration, and have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with splendid unity and faithfulness.Even young Danforth, with his nervous breakdown, has not flinched or babbled to his doctors—indeed, as I have said, there is one thing he thinks he alone saw which he will not tell even me, though I think it would help his psychological state if he would consent to do so.It might explain and relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no more than the delusive aftermath of an earlier shock.That is the impression I gather after those rare irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to me—things which he repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on himself again.
It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and some of our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice.We might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown.Lake’s reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused naturalists and palaeontologists to the highest pitch; though we were sensible enough not to shew the detached parts we had taken from the actual buried specimens, or our photographs of those specimens as they were found.We also refrained from shewing the more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish soapstones; while Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or drew on the super-plateau across the range, and the crumpled things we smoothed, studied in terror, and brought away in our pockets.But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organising, and with a thoroughness far beyond anything our outfit attempted.If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know.So I must break through all reticences at last—even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.
IV.
It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to Lake’s camp and what we really found there—and to that other thing beyond the frightful mountain wall.I am constantly tempted to shirk the details, and to let hints stand for actual facts and ineluctable deductions.I hope I have said enough already to let me glide briefly over the rest; the rest, that is, of the horror at the camp.I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged machinery, the varied uneasinesses of our dogs, the missing sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological specimens, strangely sound in texture for all their structural injuries, from a world forty million years dead.I do not recall whether I mentioned that upon checking up the canine bodies we found one dog missing.We did not think much about that till later—indeed, only Danforth and I have thought of it at all.
The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of rationale to the apparent chaos.At the time I tried to keep the men’s minds off those points; for it was so much simpler—so much more normal—to lay everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake’s party.From the look of things, that daemon mountain wind must have been enough to drive any man mad in the midst of this centre of all earthly mystery and desolation.
The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies—men and dogs alike.They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways.Death, so far as we could judge, had in each case come from strangulation or laceration.The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for the state of their ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within.It had been set some distance from the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean organisms, but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain.When left alone in that monstrous wind behind flimsy walls of insufficient height they must have stampeded—whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle, increasing odour emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say.Those specimens, of course, had been covered with a tent-cloth; yet the low antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended to make the strangely sound and tough tissues of the things relax and expand.Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth from over them, and jostled them about in such a way that their more pungent olfactory qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity.
But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough.Perhaps I had better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last—though with a categorical statement of opinion, based on the first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and myself, that the then missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found.I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled.Now I must add that some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion.It was the same with dogs and men.All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed, as by a careful butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of salt—taken from the ravaged provision-chests on the planes—which conjured up the most horrible associations.The thing had occurred in one of the crude aëroplane shelters from which the plane had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced all tracks which could have supplied any plausible theory.Scattered bits of clothing, roughly slashed from the human incision-subjects, hinted no clues.It is useless to bring up the half-impression of certain faint snow-prints