Even so great a load would not be too much for one
of the huge planes built to our special orders for heavy machinery
transportation. At intervals I still tried to reach Lake with the
wireless, but all to no purpose. Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at seven
thirty; and reported a quiet flight from several points on the wing. They arrived at our base at midnight, and all hands at once discussed
the next move. It was risky business sailing over the antarctic in a
single aëroplane without any line of bases, but no one drew back from
what seemed like the plainest necessity. We turned in at two o'clock
for a brief rest after some preliminary loading of the plane, but were
up again in four hours to finish the loading and packing. At seven fifteen a.m., January 25th, we started northwestward under
McTighe's pilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food
supply, and other items including the plane's wireless outfit. The
atmosphere was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature,
and we anticipated very little trouble in reaching the latitude and
longitude designated by Lake as the site of his camp. Our apprehensions
were over what we might find, or fail to find, at the end of our
journey, for silence continued to answer all calls dispatched to the
camp. *       *       *       *       *

Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my
recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my
loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the
normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external
nature and nature's laws. Thenceforward the ten of us--but the student Danforth and myself
above all others--were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking
horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we
would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could. The
newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plane,
telling of our nonstop course, our two battles with treacherous
upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had sunk
his mid-journey shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of
those strange fluffy snow cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as
rolling in the wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau. There came a point, though, when our sensations could not be conveyed
in any words the press would understand, and a later point when we had
to adopt an actual rule of strict censorship. The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones
and pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent every one to the windows of
the great cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in
gaining prominence; hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off,
and visible only because of their abnormal height. Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky,
allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and
to catch the curious sense of phantasy which they inspired as seen
in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of
iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of
stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these
stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into
forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space,
and ultradimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil
things--mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some
accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable
suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially
spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness,
separateness, desolation, and æon-long death of this untrodden and
unfathomed austral world. *       *       *       *       *

It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities
of the higher mountain sky line--regularities like clinging fragments
of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which
indeed justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of
primordial temple ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and
strangely painted by Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerichlike about this whole
unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October
when we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of archæan mythical
resemblances, of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the
evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings. Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia, but the racial memory of
man--or of his predecessors--is long, and it may well be that certain
tales have come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror
earlier than Asia and earlier than any human world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the
fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees
of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself. Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region I
would care to be in or near, nor did I relish the proximity of a
world that had ever bred such ambiguous and archæan monstrosities as
those Lake had just mentioned. At the moment I felt sorry that I had
ever read the abhorred _Necronomicon_, or talked so much with that
unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the university. *       *       *       *       *

This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre
mirage which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith
as we drew near the mountains and began to make out the cumulative
undulations of the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages during
the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically
vivid as the present sample, but this one had a wholly novel and
obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething
labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the
troubled ice vapors above our heads. The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to
man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black
masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There
were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by
tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often
capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks, and strange, beetling,
tablelike constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular
slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one
overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting
cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and
occasional needlelike spires in curious clusters of five.