Then when the first great earth buckling had convulsed the region in
the Comanchean Age, a frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up
amidst the most appalling din and chaos--and earth had received her
loftiest and most terrible mountains. If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must
have been much over forty thousand feet high--radically vaster than
even the shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended,
it appeared, from about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°,
E. Longitude 100°--less than three hundred miles away from the dead
city, so that we would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim
western distance had it not been for that vague, opalescent haze. Their
northern end must likewise be visible from the long antarctic circle
coast line at Queen Mary Land. Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers
to those mountains--but none ever went near them or dared to guess
what lay beyond. No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the
emotions conveyed in the carvings I prayed that none ever might. There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them--Queen Mary and
Kaiser Wilhelm Lands--and I thank Heaven no one has been able to land
and climb those hills. I am not as sceptical about old tales and fears
as I used to be, and I do not laugh now at the prehuman sculptor's
notion that lightning paused meaningfully now and then at each of the
brooding crests, and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those
terrible pinnacles all through the long polar night. There may be a
very real and very monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about
Kadath in the Cold Waste. But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less
namelessly accursed. Soon after the founding of the city the great
mountain range became the seat of the principal temples, and many
carvings showed what grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky
where now we saw only the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts. In the course of ages the caves had appeared, and had been shaped into
adjuncts of the temples. With the advance of still later epochs all
the limestone veins of the region were hollowed out by ground waters,
so that the mountains, the foothills, and the plains below them were
a veritable network of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic
sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and of the final
discovery of the Stygian sunless sea that lurked at earth's bowels. *       *       *       *       *

This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river
which flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains,
and which had formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones' range and
flowed beside that chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten
Lands on Wilkes's coast line. Little by little it had eaten away the
limestone hill base at its turning, till at last its sapping currents
reached the caverns of the ground waters and joined with them in
digging a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk emptied into the hollow hills and left the old
bed toward the ocean dry. Much of the later city as we now found it
had been built over that former bed. The Old Ones, understanding what
had happened, and exercising their always keen artistic sense, had
carved into ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where the
great stream began its descent into eternal darkness. This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly
the one whose extinct course we had seen in our aëroplane survey. Its position in different carvings of the city helped us to orient
ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stages of the region's
age-long, æon-dead history, so that we were able to sketch a hasty but
careful map of the salient features--squares, important buildings, and
the like--for guidance in further explorations. We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was
a million or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures
told us exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and
suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had
looked like. It must have had a marvelous and mystic beauty, and as I thought of
it I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which
the city's inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness and
glacial twilight had choked and weighed on my spirit. Yet, according to certain carvings the denizens of that city had
themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a
somber and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shown in
the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object--never allowed to
appear in the design--found in the great river and indicated as having
been washed down through waving, vine-draped cycad forests from those
horrible westward mountains. It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that
we obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the
city's desertion. Undoubtedly there must have been many sculptures of
the same age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and
aspirations of a stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain
evidence of the existence of others came to us shortly afterward. But
this was the first and only set we directly encountered. We meant to look farther later on; but as I have said, immediate
conditions dictated another present objective. There would, though,
have been a limit--for after all hope of a long future occupancy of the
place had perished among the Old Ones, there could not but have been a
complete cessation of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course,
was the coming of the great cold which once held most of the earth in
thrall, and which has never departed from the ill-fated poles--the
great cold that, at the world's other extremity, put an end to the
fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea. Just when this tendency began in the antarctic it would be hard to say
in terms of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general
glacial periods at a distance of about five hundred thousand years from
the present, but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced
much earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork, but it
is quite likely that the decadent sculptures were made considerably
less than a million years ago, and that the actual desertion of
the city was complete long before the conventional opening of the
Pleistocene--five hundred thousand years ago--as reckoned in terms of
the earth's whole surface. *       *       *       *       *

In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation
everywhere, and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old
Ones. Heating devices were shown in the houses, and winter travelers
were represented as muffled in protective fabrics.