At the Mountains of Madness | Page 8

limestone, full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals, echini, and spirifera,
and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges and marine vertebrate bones - the
latter probably of teleosts, sharks, and ganoids. This, in itself, was important enough, as
affording the first vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet secured; but when shortly
afterward the drill head dropped through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly new
and doubly intense wave of excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized blast
had laid open the subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged aperture perhaps five feet
across and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers a section of shallow
limestone hollowing worn more than fifty million years ago by the trickling ground

waters of a bygone tropic world.
The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep but extended off
indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which suggested its
membership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and floor were abundantly
equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites, some of which met in columnar form: but
important above all else was the vast deposit of shells and bones, which in places nearly
choked the passage. Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns and
fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous
medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species
than the greatest paleontologist could have counted or classified in a year. Mollusks,
crustacean armor, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals - great and
small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp shouting, and no
wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting cold to
where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished
aeons.
When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity, he scribbled a message in his
notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to dispatch it by wireless. This
was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones
of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mosasaur
skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing bones,
Archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks' teeth, primitive bird skulls, and other bones of
archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons, and titanotheres.
There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer, or bovine animal;
hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the Oligocene Age, and
that the hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried, dead, and inaccessible state for at
least thirty million years.
On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life forms was singular in the highest
degree. Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of such typical imbedded
fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not a particle earlier,
the free fragments in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from organisms
hitherto considered as peculiar to far older periods - even rudimentary fishes, mollusks,
and corals as remote as the Silunan or Ordovician. The inevitable inference was that in
this part of the world there had been a remarkable and unique degree of continuity
between the life of over three hundred million years ago and that of only thirty million
years ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene Age when the
cavern was closed was of course past all speculation. In any event, the coming of the
frightful ice in the Pleistocene some five hundred thousand years ago - a mere yesterday
as compared with the age of this cavity - must have put an end to any of the primal forms
which had locally managed to outlive their common terms.
Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletin written and
dispatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get back. After that
Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes, transmitting to me - and to the
Arkham for relaying to the outside world - the frequent postscripts which Lake sent him

by a succession of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers will remember the
excitement created among men of science by that afternoon's reports - reports which have
finally led, after all these years, to the organization of that very Starkweather-Moore
Expedition which I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I had better give the
messages literally as Lake sent them, and as our base operator McTighe translated them
from the pencil shorthand:
"Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone fragments
from blasts. Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate, proving
that source survived from over six hundred million