All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges
crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the
implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer
giganticism. The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms
observed and drawn by the arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820, but at
this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring
stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds,
and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our
expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and
infinitely evil portent. I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process
the various nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted, temporary
forms of even vaster hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to
churning opalescence, we began to look earthward again, and saw that
our journey's end was not far off. The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzily up like a fearsome rampart of
giants, their curious regularities showing with startling clearness
even without a field glass. We were over the lowest foothills now, and
could see amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau
a couple of darkish spots which we took to be Lake's camp and boring. The higher foothills shot up between five and six miles away, forming a
range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than Himalayan
peaks beyond them. At length Ropes--the student who had relieved
McTighe at the controls--began to head downward toward the left-hand
dark spot whose size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe sent
out the last uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from
our expedition. Every one, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of
the rest of our antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report of the tragedy we
found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole Lake party
by the frightful wind of the preceding day, or of the night before
that. There were eleven known dead, young Gedney was missing. People pardoned our hazy lack of details through realization of the
shock the sad event must have caused us, and believed us when we
explained that the mangling action of the wind had rendered all eleven
bodies unsuitable for transportation outside. Indeed, I flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress, utter
bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the
truth in any specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in
what we dared not tell; what I would not tell now but for the need of
warning others off from nameless terrors. *       *       *       *       *

It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc. Whether all
could have lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely
open to doubt. The storm, with its fury of madly driven ice particles,
must have been beyond anything our expedition had encountered before. One aëroplane shelter--all, it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy
and inadequate state--was nearly pulverized; and the derrick at the
distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces. The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was
bruised into a high polish, and two of the small tents were flattened
despite their snow banking. Wooden surfaces left out in the blast were
pitted and denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were
completely obliterated. It is also true that we found none of the archæan biological objects in
a condition to take outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals
from a vast, tumbled pile, including several of the greenish soapstone
fragments whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped
dots caused so many doubtful comparisons, and some fossil bones, among
which were the most typical of the curiously injured specimens. None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow inclosure near
the camp being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that,
though the greater breakage, on the side next to the camp, which was
not the windward one, suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic
beasts themselves. All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to explain that the wind
may have blown them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-melting
machinery at the boring were too badly damaged to warrant salvage, so
we used them to choke up that subtly disturbing gateway to the past
which Lake had blasted. We likewise left at the camp the two most shaken up of the planes;
since our surviving party had only four real pilots--Sherman, Danforth,
McTighe, and Ropes--in all, with Danforth in a poor nervous shape to
navigate. We brought back all the books, scientific equipment, and
other incidentals we could find, though much was rather unaccountably
blown away. Spare tents and furs were either missing or badly out of
condition. It was approximately four p.m., after wide plane cruising had forced
us to give Gedney up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the
_Arkham_ for relaying; and I think we did well to keep it as calm and
noncommittal as we succeeded in doing. The most we said about agitation concerned our dogs, whose frantic
uneasiness near the biological specimens was to be expected from poor
Lake's accounts. We did not mention, I think, their display of the
same uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones
and certain other objects in the disordered region--objects including
scientific instruments, aëroplanes, and machinery, both at the camp
and at the boring, whose parts had been loosened, moved, or otherwise
tampered with by winds that must have harbored singular curiosity and
investigativeness. About the fourteen biological specimens we were pardonably indefinite. We said that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough
was left of them to prove Lake's description wholly and impressively
accurate. It was hard work keeping our personal emotions out of this
matter--and we did not mention numbers or say exactly how we had found
those which we did find. We had by that time agreed not to transmit
anything suggesting madness on the part of Lake's men, and it surely
looked like madness to find six imperfect monstrosities carefully
buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds
punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly like those on
the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to have been
completely blown away. *       *       *       *       *

We were careful, too, about the public's general peace of mind; hence
Danforth and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains
the next day. It was the fact that only a radically lightened plane
could possibly cross a range of such height which mercifully limited
that scouting tour to the two of us.