Only when we had come very close to the sprawling obstructions could we
trace that second, unexplainable fetor to any immediate source--and the
instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures
of the Old Ones' history in the Permian Age one hundred and fifty
million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which echoed
hysterically through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil,
palimpsest carvings. I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those
primal sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the
nameless artist had suggested that hideous slime coating found on
certain incomplete and prostrate Old Ones--those whom the frightful
Shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly
headlessness in the great war of resubjugation. They were infamous, nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old,
bygone things; for Shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by
human beings or portrayed by any beings. The mad author of the _Necronomicon_ had nervously tried to swear that
none had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers
had ever conceived them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and
reflect all forms and organs and processes--viscous agglutinations
of bubbling cells--rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic
and ductile--slaves of suggestion, builders of cities--more and more
sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and
more imitative! Great Heaven! What madness made even those blasphemous
Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and
reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those
headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new, unknown odor whose
cause only a diseased fancy could envisage--clung to those bodies
and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly
resculptured wall in a series of grouped dots--we understood the
quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those four missing others--for all too well did we
suspect they would do no harm again. Poor devils! After all, they were
not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and
another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them--as
it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may
hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste--and
this was their tragic homecoming. They had not been even savages--for what indeed had they done? That
awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch--perhaps an attack by
the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against
them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and
paraphernalia! Poor Lake. Poor Gedney. And poor Old Ones! Scientists
to the last--what had they done that we would not have done in their
place? Lord, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the
incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things
only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities,
star spawn--whatever they had been, they were men! *       *       *       *       *

They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once
worshiped and roamed among the tree ferns. They had found their dead
city brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as
we had done. They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled
depths of blackness they had never seen--and what had they found? All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as
we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome
palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot groups of fresh slime on
the wall beside them--looked and understood what must have triumphed
and survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that nighted,
penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had
begun to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth's hysterical scream. The shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had
frozen us into mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later
conversations that we have learned of the complete identity of our
thoughts at that moment. It seemed æons that we stood there, but actually it could not have been
more than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled
forward as if veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulk--and then
came a sound which upset much of what we had just decided, and in so
doing broke the spell and enabled us to run like mad past squawking,
confused penguins over our former trail back to the city, along
ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open circle, and up that
archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied, automatic plunge for the sane outer
air and light of day. [Illustration: _And then came a sound--a horrible sound--which enabled
us to run like mad for the sane outer air_----]

The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided;
because it was what poor Lake's dissection had led us to attribute
to those we had just judged dead. It was, Danforth later told me,
precisely what he had caught in infinitely muffled form when at that
spot beyond the alley corner above the glacial level; and it certainly
had a shocking resemblance to the wind pipings we had both heard around
the lofty mountain caves. At the risk of seeming puerile I will add another thing, too, if
only because of the surprising way Danforth's impression chimed with
mine. Of course, common reading is what prepared us both to make the
interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer notions about
unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when
writing his "Arthur Gordon Pym" a century ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of
unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the
antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic, spectrally snowy
birds of that malign region's core. "_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_" That, I
may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden
sound behind the advancing white mist--that insidious, musical piping
over a singularly wide range. *       *       *       *       *

We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been
uttered, though we knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable
any scream-roused and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us
in a moment if it really wished to do so. We had a vague hope, however, that nonaggressive conduct and a display
of kindred reason might cause such a being to spare us in case of
capture, if only from scientific curiosity. After all, if such a one had nothing to fear for itself it would have
no motive in harming us. Concealment being futile at this juncture, we
used our torch for a running glance behind, and perceived that the mist
was thinning. Would we see at last, a complete and living specimen of
those others?