"At the Mountains of Madness"

 

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Astounding Stories, February and March, 1936

Dr. William Dyer, a geologist at Miskatonc U, has something he wants the world to know.

It seems there's a highly-publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica about to launch.  And Dyer has a dire (sorry, had to) warning for them.  You see, he was a member of a smaller Antarctic expedition a few years back, and there's some things he and his fellow survivors (hint hint - not all of his team made it back) have kept under wraps.  But now, for the sake of protecting other hapless explorers from getting in the same jam he and his got into, the whole truth and nothing but the truth shall be known!

Out there in the frozen lands, they found a previously unknown range of mountains that put the Himalayas to shame.  And some pretty amazing fossils.  And then, one member named Lake and a small team found fourteen frozen bodies (described in intense detail) that L. Sprague DeCamp flippantly described as extraterrestrial sea cucumbers.  Well whatever they are they're weird as hell and pretty gross-sounding.

What's more they found `em in layers of rock so friggin' old that such life forms couldn't possibly have existed that far back!  Well, except apparently they could, cuz ... but anyway this is an exciting find!  Nevertheless these things are weird as hell and the sled dogs hate their frozen bods so much they have to be restrained at considerable distance from them.

However, Lake and team lost contact, and Dyer takes the rest to find out what happened.  When they get there, the camp has been devastated.  Everyone's been slaughtered except one man (Gedney) and one dog.  And most of the monster bods are gone.  And someone dissected a man, and a dog, in one of the tents.  I mean dissected - not just hacked up.  Dyer decides the missing man must have gone nuts and killed and mutilated all the others.  Hid buddy Danforth ain't so sure.

Dyer and Danforth go on to discover the ruins of a huge, ancient, and decidedly non-human civilization, one which resembles things mentioned in The Necronomicon.   The beings who built this civ - i.e. the sea cucumber things - were assisted and served by a race of gloop monsters called shoggoths which they bred for service.  Apparently all earthly life also evolved from shoggoth ingredients, thus making the sea cucumbers the creators of mankind (and everything else).  They also learn of great wars betwee the sea cucumbers, the Mi-Go, and the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu.  And of a revolt by the shoggoths, and the decline and degradation of sea cucumber civilization.  It also appears there was something in the enormous mountain ranged beyond the city that the cucumbers were afraid of.  

Eventually they realize (or admit) that the cucumbers thought to be dead had actually been alive, revived, and killed and dissected the men and dogs.  They find the bodies of the now-slaughtered revived cucumbers, and also some giant, blind albino penguins - which don't seem to be responsible for the cucumber-cide.  They encounter a living black bubbling blob - a shoggoth.  They escape and manage to fly their plane out, but Danforth looks back and sees something beyond the mountains  - the thing the cucumbers feared, and goes mad, screaming in imitation of the sounds made by the shoggoths...

I remember the first time I read "Mountains".  It was a bitterly cold and gray day in January.  I cut school and stayed home, wrapped up in blankets with the lights on, as the sun never came out that day, not once - it was like perpetual twilight.   And I intended to start reading "Mountains", but I got sucked in, and 3-4 hours later I was wrapping the sucker up, my little teenaged brain blown.  

Lin Carter has called the story plodding and slow.  It is slow, though I never find it plodding. The interesting thing is it now reads to me like an archaic National Geographic article.  And that is, I think, entirely the intention.  Lovecraft, in the voice of Dyer, keeps listening times and temps and latitudes and longitudes (supposedly all of HPL's Antarctic data was accurate, at least as known in the early 30's). All of this, as in "The Shadow Out Of Time", where he does much the same thing, is intended to give an air of verisimilitude to the tale.  This is supposed to be a true story.  Outlandish, wild, and a dire warning.  Dyer wants to be believed, and he's offering up details to bolster his plausibility.

I dunno, I might find it plodding too if I came to it blind.  But since I've read it a couple times before, this re-read was thoroughly enjoyable, like re-watching a favorite old movie even though one could practically quote all the dialog.  

As it was I really enjoyed this one.  I've been putting off re-reading "Mountains" for several years because I thought I would find it slow going, but I was completely into it and enjoyed every minute of it this time around.