There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not
to flee for our lives after that; since our conclusions were
now--notwithstanding their wildness--completely fixed, and of a nature
I need not even mention to those who have read my account as far as
this. Perhaps we were mad--for have I not said those horrible peaks
were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of the
same spirit--albeit in a less extreme form--in the men who stalk
deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study
their habits. Half paralyzed with terror though we were, there was
nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity
which triumphed in the end. Of course, we did not mean to face that--or those--which we knew had
been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by
this time have found the other neighboring entrance to the abyss, and
have passed within, to whatever night-black fragments of the past might
await them in the ultimate gulf--the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the
north seeking another. They were, we remembered, partly independent of
light. Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise
form our new emotions took--just what change of immediate objective it
was that so sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not
mean to face what we feared--yet I will not deny that we may have had
a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden
vantage point. Probably we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself,
though there was interposed a new goal in the form of that great
circular place shown on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at
once recognized it as a monstrous cylindrical tower in the carvings,
but appearing only as a prodigious, round aperture from above. Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these
hasty diagrams, made us think that its subglacial levels must
still form a feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied
architectural marvels as yet unencountered by us. It was certainly of
incredible age, according to the sculptures in which it figured--being
indeed among the first things built in the city. Its carvings, if
preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover, it might form
a good present link with the upper world--a shorter route than the one
we were so carefully blazing and probably that by which those others
had descended. *       *       *       *       *

At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches--which
quite perfectly confirmed our own--and start back over the indicated
course to the circular place; the course which our nameless
predecessors must have traversed twice before us. The other neighboring
gate to the abyss would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our
journey--during which we continued to leave an economical trail of
paper--for it was precisely the same in kind as that by which we had
reached the cul-de-sac, except that it tended to adhere more closely to
the ground level and even descend to basement corridors. Every now and then we could trace certain disturbing marks
in the débris or litter underfoot; and, after we had passed
outside the radius of the gasoline scent, we were again faintly
conscious--spasmodically--of that more hideous and more persistent
scent. After the way had branched from our former course, we sometimes
gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls;
noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which
indeed seem to have formed a main æsthetic outlet for the Old Ones. About nine-thirty p.m., while traversing a vaulted corridor whose
increasingly glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and
whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight
ahead and were able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were
coming to the vast, circular place, and that our distance from the
upper air could not be very great. The corridor ended in an arch, surprisingly low for these megalithic
ruins, but we could see much through it even before we emerged. Beyond,
there stretched a prodigious round space--fully two hundred feet in
diameter--strewn with débris and containing many choked archways
corresponding to the one we were about to cross. The walls were--in
available spaces--boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic
proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused
by the openness of the spot, an artistic splendor far beyond anything
we had encountered before. The littered floor was quite heavily
glaciated, and we fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably
lower depth. But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which,
eluding the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound
spirally up the stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart
of those once climbing outside the monstrous towers or zikkurats of
antique Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight, and the perspective
which confounded the descent with the tower's inner wall, had
prevented our noticing this feature from the air, and thus caused us to
seek another avenue to the subglacial level. Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of engineering held it
in place, but Danforth and I could merely admire and marvel. We could
see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there, but what we saw
seemed inadequate to the function performed. The thing was excellently
preserved up to the present top of the tower--a highly remarkable
circumstance in view of its exposure--and its shelter had done much to
protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls. *       *       *       *       *

As we stepped out into the awesome half daylight of this monstrous
cylinder bottom--fifty million years old, and without doubt the most
primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes--we saw that the
ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty
feet. This, we recalled from our aërial survey, meant an outside glaciation
of some forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had seen from the plane
had been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot mound of crumbled
masonry, somewhat sheltered for three fourths of its circumference by
the massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins. According to the
sculptures the original tower had stood in the center of an immense
circular plaza, and had been perhaps five hundred or six hundred
feet high, with tiers of horizontal disks near the top, and a row of
needlelike spires along the upper rim. Most of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward--a
fortunate happening, since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered
and the whole interior choked. As it was, the ramp showed sad
battering; whilst the choking was such that all the archways seemed to
have been half cleared.