At the Mountains of Madness | Page 3

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,
and other accessories, including three small portable wireless outfits - besides those in the
planes - capable of communicating with the Arkham's large outfit from any part of the
antarctic continent that we would be likely to visit. The ship's outfit, communicating with
the outside world, was to convey press reports to the Arkham Advertiser's powerful

wireless station on Kingsport Head, Massachusetts. We hoped to complete our work
during a single antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible, we would winter on the
Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice for another summer's
supplies.
I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early work: of
our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island
and the singular speed with which Pabodie's apparatus accomplished them, even through
solid rock layers; our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous
ascent of the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five
huge aeroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party - twenty men
and fifty-five Alaskan sledge dogs - was remarkable, though of course we had so far
encountered no really destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most part, the
thermometer varied between zero and 20¡ or 25¡ above, and our experience with New
England winters had accustomed us to rigors of this sort. The barrier camp was
semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite,
and other supplies.
Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material, the fifth being
left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storage cache to form a means of
reaching us from the Arkham in case all our exploring planes were lost. Later,