At the Mountains of Madness

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Lovecraft as usual driving people insane with the mundane mixed with the unmasking of the unknown.

More than anything, this book is inconsistent. There are moments that are really cool, followed by something that is absurd, followed by something that is just confusing. There are certain narrative techniques that I don't like at all, especially "oh, I can't tell you what is going on because it is too distressing, so I'm just going to hint a lot". That being said, the ideas are still interesting.

I must admit I confused H. P lovecraft and H. G Wells. Don't know how but I thought it was just one person that had written every thing. As they say you live and you learn. Love stories set in artic and add in some itensety and struggles and I'm usually very pleased. But sadly I didn't get into this one. Well written for sure but I was more focused on how it was written rather then the plot. Will probebly read more from H. P lovecraft before writing his wok of.

I could not help feeling that they were evil things—mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

At the Mountains of Madness in many ways reminds me of Jules Verne’s

Journey to the Centre of the Earth: fantastic atmosphere, page-turning adventure, and very poor (essentially nonexistent) characterization. Lovecraft excels at writing beautiful prose and creating spellbinding imagery, but he also dips much more into the bizarre than I cared for (though, as with

The Colour Out of Space, it is still far less pulpy than I’d expected).

I love a good framing device, and so does Lovecraft. Here Dyer is telling his cautionary tale in an attempt to discourage future expeditions, and while that does take some of the tension out of the story (as clearly he survived, no matter how harrowing the events), I enjoyed it nonetheless. It seems that Lovecraft has developed an extensive universe of places, creatures, and fictional books, and while I’m not really that invested in exploring any sort of “expanded universe” it does give this story a nice sense of depth and reality. Similarly, Lovecraft sprinkles in references to authors like Poe and various painters, which gave a bit of a cultured and classic feel to the story. Unfortunately, once the characters are established by profession, Lovecraft is completely uninterested in developing them further (there is essentially no dialogue beyond radio reports, which function more like straight narrative), so I had no real emotional investment, and the horror didn’t quite land.

A good chunk of the book is developed to describing

the Old Ones’ anatomy (per the specimens that the first group of explorers find), and later to recounting their many millions of years of history and culture, often in extreme detail (which Dyer is able to deduce by looking at a series of bas-relief murals by flashlight while hurriedly exploring their city—I’m not usually one to call “plot hole!” but, come on, we can all agree that this is more than a bit ridiculous)

. I’m sorry, but it’s not that interesting and is a bit too weird for me. To be honest,

this is what I thought Lovecraft was going to be like, and it’s mostly kind of eye-roll-inducing…to say nothing of

the giant blind penguins

, which were just silly.

Luckily, the majority of the story is gripping. Lovecraft’s descriptions are beautifully written (maybe even overwritten, but I love it anyway) and incredibly atmospheric. The structures they explore have a lovely abandoned, labyrinthine, and liminal quality that reminds me a bit of

Piranesi. And when it comes to the horror element, for the most part Lovecraft attempts to find horror in a sense of grandeur and cosmic insignificance, which I like much more than tentacled aliens or eldritch balls of amorphous slime (

though we get those too

).

I did really like

At the Mountains of Madness, but I’m not that much of a short story person so unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be exploring Lovecraft further.

Some favorite passages:

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.

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.

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 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.

In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments; notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such mollusks as linguellae and gastropods—all of which seemed of real significance in connection with the region's primordial history.

Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.

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.

where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished aeons.

"Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes inevitable.

Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultra-dimensionality.

The touch of evil mystery in these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words. Rather was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association—a thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes.

Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert.

Though lower parts must have originally existed, all traces of such things were now wholly obscured by the deep layer of ice and snow at this point.

Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume—throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion.

Could one be sure of what might or might not linger, even to this day, in the lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth's deepest waters?

This, of course, had to do with the chiseled avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had not known before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse. From the evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply descending walk of about a mile through either of the neighboring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs about the great abyss; down whose sides paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean.

As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and compass—traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and clambering down again, encountering choked doorways and piles of debris, hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate stretches, taking false leads and retracing our way (in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight poured or trickled down—we were repeatedly tantalized by the sculptured walls along our route.

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.

The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated, and we fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.

Doubtless it was suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the known conditions, but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspect—indeed, it was just such a lure which had brought us to this unearthly polar waste in the first place.

That others had recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presence of a used flashlight battery on the floor in front of one of the most characteristic cartouches.

—we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths.

Not Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance.

It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's "thing that should not be;" and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform —the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder. But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry—"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" and at last we remembered that the demoniac Shoggoths —given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups expressed—had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters.

The low antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast with such relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape. The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapors, and the cold clutched at our vitals.

For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls.

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.