I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared
at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the pass. But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous
nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling
about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the
cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy,
rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely
clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass,
that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster, by shattering
my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the
controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and
we made the crossing safely----Yet I am afraid that Danforth will never
be the same again. I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him
scream out so insanely--a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly
responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted
conversation above the wind's piping and the engine's buzzing as we
reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the
camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made
as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. *       *       *       *       *

All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a
mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes
and caves of those echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains
of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, demonic glimpse,
among the churning westward zenith clouds, of what lay back of those
other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and
feared. He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things
about "the black pit," "the carven rim," "the proto-Shoggoths," "the
windowless solids with five dimensions," "the nameless cylinders," "the
elder pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color out
of space," "the wings," "the eyes in darkness," "the moon-ladder," "the
original, the eternal, the undying," and other bizarre conceptions;
but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it
to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed,
is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through
that worm-riddled copy of the _Necronomicon_ kept under lock and key in
the college library. The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and
disturbed enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well
imagine that its swirls of ice dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be
reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud,
might easily have supplied the rest--and, of course, Danforth did not
hint any of these specific horrors till after his memory had had a
chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much
in one instantaneous glance. At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single,
mad word of all too obvious source: "_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_"