Lovecraft, H P - At The Mountains Of Madness

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At the Mountains of Madness

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Feb-22 Mar 1931

Published February-April 1936 in Astounding Stories, Vol. 16, No. 6 (February 1936), p.

8-32; Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 1936), p. 125-55; Vol. 17, No. 2 (April 1936), p. 132-50.

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without

knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this

contemplated invasion of the antarctic - with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring

and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning

may be in vain.

Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I suppressed what will

seem extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld

photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in my favor, for they are damnably

vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever

fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious

impostures, notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark

and puzzle over.

In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who

have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own

hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth

cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general

from any rash and over-ambitious program in the region of those mountains of madness.

It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates,

connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an impression where

matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.

It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the fields which

came primarily to be concerned. As a geologist, my object in leading the Miskatonic

University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil

from various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by

Professor Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a pioneer

in any other field than this, but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at

different points along previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort

hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection.

Pabodie's drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was unique

and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian drill

principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope

At the Mountains of Madness

quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor,

collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger,

and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep all

formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could

carry. This was made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal

objects were fashioned. Four large Dornier aeroplanes, designed especially for the

tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-

warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport our entire

expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland

points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us.

We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season - or longer, if absolutely

necessary - would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and on the plateau

south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott,

and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by aeroplane and involving distances

great enough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite

unprecedented amount of material - especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so

narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to

obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life

history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge

of the earth's past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical, with

a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and

penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter of common information;

and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy, and detail. When a simple

boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would enlarge the aperture by blasting, in order to

get specimens of suitable size and condition.

Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper soil or rock,

were to be confined to exposed, or nearly exposed, land surfaces - these inevitably being

slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the

lower levels. We could not afford to waste drilling the depth of any considerable amount

of mere glaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes

in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with current from a

gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan - which we could not put into effect except

experimentally on an expedition such as ours - that the coming Starkweather-Moore

Expedition proposes to follow, despite the warnings I have issued since our return from

the antarctic.

The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless reports to

the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later articles of Pabodie and

myself. We consisted of four men from the University - Pabodie, Lake of the biology

department, Atwood of the physics department - also a meteorologist - and myself,

representing geology and having nominal command - besides sixteen assistants: seven

graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve

were qualified aeroplane pilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless operators.

Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood,

At the Mountains of Madness

and I. In addition, of course, our two ships - wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice

conditions and having auxiliary steam - were fully manned.

The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions, financed

the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough, despite the absence of

great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of

our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were loaded. We were

marvelously well-equipped for our specific purposes, and in all matters pertaining to

supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp construction we profited by the excellent

example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the unusual

number and fame of these predecessors which made our own expedition - ample though it

was - so little noticed by the world at large.

As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd, 1930, taking a

leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa

and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our

exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on

our ship captains - J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as

commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque

Miskatonic - both veteran whalers in antarctic waters.

As we left the inhabited world behind, the sun sank lower and lower in the north, and

stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62° South Latitude we

sighted our first icebergs - table-like objects with vertical sides - and just before reaching

the antarctic circle, which we crossed on October 20th with appropriately quaint

ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature

bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace

up for the worse rigors to come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects

enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage - the first I had ever seen -

in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly packed, we

regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175° On the morning of

October 26th a strong land blink appeared on the south, and before noon we all felt a

thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which

opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of

the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were

obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to

round Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base

on the shore of McMurdo Sound, at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77°

9'.

The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks of mystery

loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower

horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white

snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the

At the Mountains of Madness

desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose

cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping,

with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic

reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene

reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of

the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng

which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather

sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.

On the 7th of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily lost, we

passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on

Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now

stretched off to the east the low, white line of the great ice barrier, rising perpendicularly

to a height of two hundred feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of

southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the

coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up some twelve

thousand, seven hundred feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred

Fujiyama, while beyond it rose the white, ghostlike height of Mt. Terror, ten thousand,

nine hundred feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano.

Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate assistants - a

brilliant young fellow named Danforth - pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy

slope, remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source

of Poe's image when he wrote seven years later:

- the lavas that restlessly roll

Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek

In the ultimate climes of the pole -

That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek

In the realms of the boreal pole.

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe. I was

interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe's only long story - the disturbing

and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in

the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins, while

many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of

slowly drifting ice.

Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after midnight

on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing to

unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on first

treading Antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular point

the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore

below the volcano's slope was only a provisional one, headquarters being kept aboard the

Arkham. We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline

tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and aerial, aeroplane parts,

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摘要：

AttheMountainsofMadnessAttheMountainsofMadnessbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenFeb-22Mar1931PublishedFebruary-April1936inAstoundingStories,Vol.16,No.6(February1936),p.8-32;Vol.17,No.1(March1936),p.125-55;Vol.17,No.2(April1936),p.132-50.IIamforcedintospeechbecausemenofsciencehaverefusedtofollowmyadvicewithoutkn...

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Lovecraft, H P - At The Mountains Of Madness

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