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of instantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively, though in vain,
for a farther doorway. In another moment, however, Danforth s sharp vision had
descried a place where the floor debris had been disturbed; and we turned on
both torches full strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually simple
and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because of what it
implied. It was a rough leveling of the debris, upon which several small objects
lay carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount of
gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odor even at
this extreme superplateau altitude. In other words, it could not be other than a
sort of camp - a camp made by questing beings who, like us, had been turned back
by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.
Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was concerned,
all from Lake s camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we
had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches, three illustrated books more
or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with its pictorial and
instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur
and tent cloth, a used electric battery with circular of directions, a folder
that came with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It
was all bad enough but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on
them, we felt we had come to the worst. We had found certain inexplicably
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blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet the effect of the
sight down there in the prehuman vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much
to bear.
A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on
the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave
mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably have prepared rough, hasty
sketches - varying in their accuracy or lack of it - which outlined the
neighboring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly represented
place outside our previous route - a place we identified as a great cylindrical
tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aerial survey
- to the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel mouth therein.
He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite
obviously compiled, as our own had been, from late sculptures somewhere in the
glacial labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had seen and used. But what
the art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute those sketches in a
strange and assured technique perhaps superior, despite haste and carelessness,
to any of the decadent carvings from which they were taken - the characteristic
and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones themselves in the dead city s heyday.
There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for our
lives after that; since our conclusions were now - notwithstanding their
wildness - completely fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention to those
who have read my account as far as this. Perhaps we were mad - for have I not
said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect
something of the same spirit - albeit in a less extreme form - in the men who
stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their
habits. Half paralyzed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned
within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.
Of course we did not mean to face that - or those - which we knew had been
there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this time have
found the other neighboring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within, to
whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate gulf
- the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance, too, was blocked,
they would have gone on to the north seeking another. They were, we remembered,
partly independent of light.
Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our
new emotions took - just what change of immediate objective it was that so
sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what we
feared - yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to
spy certain things from some hidden vantage point. Probably we had not given up
our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though there was interposed a new goal in
the form of that great circular place shown on the crumpled sketches we had
found. We had at once recognized it as a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in
the very earliest carvings, but appearing only as a prodigious round aperture
from above. Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these
hasty diagrams, made us think that its subglacial levels must still form a
feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet
unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible age according to the
sculptures in which it figured - being indeed among the first things built in
the city. Its carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant.
Moreover, it might form a good present link with the upper world - a shorter
route than the one we were so carefully blazing, and probably that by which
those others had descended.
At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches - which quite
perfectly confirmed our own - and start back over the indicated course to the
circular place; the course which our nameless predecessors must have traversed
twice before us. The other neighboring gate to the abyss would lie beyond that.
I need not speak of our journey - during which we continued to leave an
economical trail of paper - for it was precisely the same in kind as that by
which we had reached the cul-de-sac; except that it tended to adhere more
closely to the ground level and even descend to basement corridors. Every now
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and then we could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter
underfoot; and after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline scent, we
were again faintly conscious - spasmodically - of that more hideous and more
persistent scent. After the way had branched from our former course, we
sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls;
noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which indeed
seem to have formed a main aesthetic outlet for the Old Ones.
About 9:30 P.M., while traversing a long, vaulted corridor whose increasingly
glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose roof grew lower [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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