At the Mountains of Madness | Page 5

on the smaller continental division, as we mistakenly conceived it.
Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable for purposes of comparison. Our
health so far had remained excellent - lime juice well offsetting the steady diet of tinned
and salted food, and temperatures generally above zero enabling us to do without our
thickest furs. It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we might be able to
conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long antarctic night.
Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped damage
through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary aeroplane shelters and windbreaks of
heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing the principal camp buildings with snow. Our good

luck and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.
The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told also of Lake's strange
and dogged insistence on a westward - or rather, northwestward - prospecting trip before
our radical shift to the new base. It seems that he had pondered a great deal, and with
alarmingly radical daring, over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into it
certain contradictions in nature and geological period which whetted his curiosity to the
utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the west-stretching
formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged. He was strangely
convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically
unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the
rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date - Cambrian if not actually
pre-Cambrian - as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life,
but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These fragments,
with their odd marking, must have been five hundred million to a thousand million years
old.
II
Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of Lake's start
northwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or penetrated by human
imagination, though we did not mention his wild hopes of revolutionizing the entire
sciences of biology and geology. His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January
11th to 18th with Pabodie and five others - marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset
when crossing one of the great pressure ridges in the ice - had brought up more and more
of the Archaean slate; and even I was interested by the singular profusion of evident
fossil markings in that unbelievably ancient stratum. These markings, however, were of
very primitive life forms involving no great paradox except that any life forms should
occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed to see
the good sense of Lake's demand for an interlude in our time-saving program - an
interlude requiring the use of all four planes, many men, and the whole of the expedition's
mechanical apparatus. I did not, in the end, veto the plan, though I decided not to
accompany the northwestward party despite Lake's plea for my geological advice. While
they were gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and work out final
plans for the eastward shift. In preparation for this transfer, one of the planes had begun
to move up a good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound; but this could wait
temporarily. I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be at any time
without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world of aeon-long death.
Lake's sub-expedition into the unknown, as everyone will recall, sent out its own reports
from the shortwave transmitters on the planes; these being simultaneously picked up by
our apparatus at the southern base and by the Arkham at McMurdo Sound, whence they
were relayed to the outside world on wave lengths up to fifty meters. The start was made
January 22nd at 4 A.M., and the first wireless message we received came only two hours
later, when Lake spoke of descending and starting a small-scale ice-melting and bore at a
point some three hundred miles away from us. Six hours after that a second and very
excited message told of the frantic, beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft had been

sunk and blasted, culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with several markings
approximately like the one which had caused the original puzzlement.
Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight in the teeth of a
raw and piercing gale; and when I dispatched a message of protest against further hazards,
Lake replied curtly that his new specimens made any hazard worth taking. I saw that his
excitement had reached the point of mutiny, and that I