It was the utter, objective embodiment of
the fantastic novelist's 'thing that should not be'; and its nearest
comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees
it from a station platform--the great black front looming colossally
out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely
colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow. But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as
the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly
onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and
driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss
vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing, vaster than any subway train--a
shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and
with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of
greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon
us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening
floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry--"_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_" And at
last we remembered that the demonic Shoggoths--given life, though, and
plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language
save that which the dot groups expressed--had likewise no voice save
the imitated accents of their bygone masters. XII. Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured
hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms
and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream fragments
involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from those
buried epochs; for as we wound our panting way up the sixty-foot
cylinder of primal masonry we glimpsed beside us a continuous
procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race's early and undecayed
technique--a farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million years
ago. Finally, scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound
of tumbled blocks, with the curved walls of higher stonework rising
westward, and the brooding peaks of the great mountains showing beyond
the more crumbled structures toward the east. The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice vapors,
and the cold clutched at our vitals. In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the
foothills--the probable ancient terrace--by which we had descended, and
could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on
the rising slope ahead. Halfway uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing
spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic tangle of incredible
stone shapes below us--once more outlined mystically against an unknown
west. As we did so we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning
haziness; the restless ice vapors having moved up to the zenith, where
their mocking outlines seemed on the point of settling into some
bizarre pattern which they feared to make quite definite or conclusive. *       *       *       *       *

There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind
the grotesque city a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose
needle-pointed heights loomed dreamlike against the beckoning rose
color of the western sky. Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the
ancient table-land, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing
it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic
beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this
far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of
the forbidden land--highest of earth's peaks and focus of earth's evil;
harborers of nameless horrors and Archæan secrets; shunned and prayed
to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living
thing of earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending
strange beams across the plains in the polar night. If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told
truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than three
hundred miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin
essence jut above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of
a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of
what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their
accursed sloping--and wondered how much sense and how much folly had
lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently. I recalled how their northerly end must come near the coast at Queen
Mary Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition
was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away; and hoped that
no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what
might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed a
measure of my overwrought condition at the time--and Danforth seemed to
be even worse. Yet before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our
plane our fears had become transferred to the lesser, but vast enough,
range whose re-crossing lay ahead of us. From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly
and hideously against the east, again reminding us of those strange
Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the
damnable honeycombings inside them, and of the frightful amorphous
entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming sway even to
the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the
prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave mouths where
the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range. To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around
several of the summits--as poor Lake must have done when he made that
early mistake about volcanism--and thought shiveringly of that kindred
mist from which we had just escaped--of that, and of the blasphemous,
horror-fostering abyss whence all such vapors came. *       *       *       *       *

All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying
furs. Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a
very smooth take-off over the nightmare city. At a very high level there must have been great disturbance, since the
ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things;
but at twenty-four thousand feet, the height we needed for the pass, we
found navigation quite practicable. As we drew close to the jutting peaks the wind's strange piping again
became manifest, and I could see Danforth's hands trembling at the
controls. Rank amateur though I was, I thought at that moment that I
might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing
between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take
over his duties he did not protest.