The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies,
and to certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and
incredible kind of rationale to the apparent chaos. At the time, I tried to keep the men's minds off those points; for
it was so much simpler--so much more normal--to lay everything to an
outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake's party. From the look
of things, that demon mountain wind must have been enough to drive
any man mad in the midst of this center of all earthly mystery and
desolation. The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the
bodies--men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind
of conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether
inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each case
come from strangulation or laceration. The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for the state of their
ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within. It had been set some distance from the camp because of the hatred of
the animals for those hellish archæan organisms, but the precaution
seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in that monstrous
wind, behind flimsy walls of insufficient height, they must have
stampeded--whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle,
increasing odor emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say. *       *       *       *       *

But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I had better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at
last--though with a categorical statement of opinion, based on the
first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and
myself, that the then missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the
loathsome horrors we found. I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must
add that some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious,
cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was the same with dogs and men. All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had
their most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed, as by a careful
butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of salt--taken from
the ravaged provision chests on the planes--which conjured up the most
horrible associations. The thing had occurred in one of the crude aëroplane shelters from
which the plane had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced
all tracks which could have supplied any plausible theory. Scattered
bits of clothing, roughly slashed from the human incision subjects,
hinted no clues. It is useless to bring up the half impression of certain faint snow
prints in one shielded corner of the ruined inclosure--because that
impression did not concern human prints at all, but was clearly
mixed up with all the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake had been
giving throughout the preceding weeks. One had to be careful of one's
imagination in the lee of those overshadowing mountains of madness. As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in
the end. When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs
and two men; but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent, which we entered
after investigating the monstrous graves, had something to reveal. It was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the primal
monstrosity had been removed from the improvised table. Indeed, we had
already realized that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried
things we had found--the one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful
odor--must represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake
had tried to analyze. On and around that laboratory table were strewn other things, and it
did not take long for us to guess that those things were the carefully,
though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I
shall spare the feelings of survivors by omitting mention of the man's
identity. Lake's anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidences
of their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though
around it we found a curious litter of matches. We buried the human
parts beside the other ten men, and the canine parts with the other
thirty-five dogs. Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory
table, and on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated books scattered
near it, we were much too bewildered to speculate. This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were
equally perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the
eight uninjured biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain
instruments, illustrated technical and scientific books, writing
materials, electric torches and batteries, food and fuel, heating
apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like, was utterly beyond
sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink blots on
certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien fumbling
and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices
both at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly
disordered machinery. Then, too, there was the upsetting of the larder, the disappearance
of certain staples, and the jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried
open in the most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely places. The
profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or spent, formed
another minor enigma--as did the two or three tent cloths and fur suits
which we found lying about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings
conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations. The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies, and the crazy burial
of the damaged archæan specimens, were all of a piece with this
apparent disintegrative madness. In view of just such an eventuality
as the present one, we carefully photographed all the main evidences
of insane disorder at the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress
our pleas against the departure of the proposed Starkweather-Moore
Expedition. *       *       *       *       *

Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph
and open the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds,
with their clusters of grouped dots, to poor Lake's descriptions of the
strange greenish soapstones; and when we came on some of the soapstones
themselves in the great mineral pile we found the likeness very close
indeed. The whole general formation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably
suggestive of the starfish head of the archæan entities; and we agreed
that the suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitized minds
of Lake's overwrought party. For madness--centering in Gedney as the only possible surviving
agent--was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far
as spoken utterance was concerned; though I will not be so naïve as
to deny that each of us may have harbored wild guesses which sanity
forbade him to formulate completely.